As a Southern Black progressive, I welcome the coming racial realignment! The Blacks = Dems sentiment is essentially a response to fear of Republicans, but even if correct a fear-based coalition can't do much.
That said, I would like to see these types of polling results broken out by region. Most African Americans have a Southern heritage, but I would guess those of us still in the South are both somewhat more conservative overall and less distinctively conservative relative to our white neighbors.
Hopefully the racial realignment will make southern Republicans stop their undemocratic focus on racially gerrymandering too. I imagine we're still a decade or two from having that come to fruition, but it's something to hope for.
It my lifetime I have only witnessed Republicans become more morally debased and absurd. It would take a lot for them to move away from their current trajectory. Trump might not be a climax but a stepping stone to levels of moral corruption and delusion currently unfathomable.
On election night, watch Merriwether County, GA. It’s small and counts quickly. It’s also roughly half white and half black and half rural whites. I seriously doubt Harris gets over 15% of the white vote there. It’s also highly segregated, the eastern precincts are lilly white, greenville is almost entirely black. You’ll be able to get data on racial voting patterns fairly early if you look at jt.
I think it could make it worse. Racial gerrymandering at least gave Republicans an out to say that they were accommodating more minority representation in legislatures. But if that's not necessary anymore, alongside the terrible Rucho v. Common Cause SCOTUS case, we could see them go full on with the most salient urban/rural divide, and gerrymander more cities than Nashville or Salt Lake City to oblivion.
I wouldn't doubt the ability. I live in the most gerrymandered state in the US, North Carolina. When the designer of one of the maps some time back was asked why in a state that was only slightly R leaning, they had a map that would give 11 of 13 seats to the Rs, his answer was that he couldnt find a way to get 12.
As City of Trees note the killer was Rucho which constitutionalized partisan gerrymandering by a 5-4 vote along partisan lines, and that wont be overturned with this court. I wont claim that it was unjustified, Constitutional law is above my pay grade, and it might be that the Constitution doesn't forbid partisan gerrymandering, but common decency does.
The goals are certainly partisan and it is just that the Black vote is so high percentage Dem that any partisan gerrymander will likely look racial The courts have become more reluctant on calling the racial out, but I hardly care as partisan gerrymandering is just wrong.
Is there also a tendency for better-educated (and therefore statistically more liberal) Southern Black folks to move out of the South? (Southern Whites definitely do this, a substantial chunk of my law school class (in the Northeast) was White Southerners who said they came here because they were too liberal for Alabama/Texas/South Carolina/etc. The Democratic Law Students was run by Southern students for a few years. And of the ones I knew only one went back to the South after graduation.)
This was true up through the 60s, but now the trend is going the other way, called reverse great migration where Northern blacks are moving South to places like Atlanta, Charlotte, Raleigh, less so the deep South, to escape the crime and high cost of living in the North. This accounts for some of the trend in Georgia in particular toward Democrats.
The other trend is that college grads are increasingly moving to some of the high tech areas in the South like Research Triangle, NC and Atlanta.
The percentage of Blacks living in the South reached a low point in 1970 but has risen in all the decades since.
I indicated South not Deep South and if you follow the Wiki link in the aggregate the entire South is seeing a gain though not so much in the Deep South ie MS, AL, AR and more GA, NC, TX, FL.
Kenny I suspect that the cohort returning is higher education though I dont know if I have data on that. The states mentioned TX, NC, GA have strong tech and research job growth.
>Is there also a tendency for better-educated (and therefore statistically more liberal) Southern Black folks to move out of the South?<
Undoubtedly such a tendency exists, in that higher-educated (and therefore higher-earning) Americans move across state lines more frequently than less well-educated Americans. Black Americans are not an exception, and obviously a nonzero percentage of Southern Black professionals who move across state lines move out of the region. I'm not sure the number is large, though, and it would also have to be balanced against Black professionals who depart other regions *for* the South. Metros like Atlanta, Orlando, Charlotte, Nashville etc are pretty big magnets for American professionals of all backgrounds, and I'd personally be surprised if the South were losing college-educated Black people on net.
Ernest I don't know if the impetus was fear as much as loyalty to FDR, JFK, LBJ as the Dems with the exception of the Dixiecrats were bigger on civil rights as the GOP courted the white Southern vote. And then the Southern Dems switched to the GOP like Helms and Thurmond.
Matt's post pairs well with yesterday's loooooong NYTimes article about DEI at the University of Michigan. It seems the more Progressive wing of the coalition doesn't understand black people any more than Republicans do.
Man, it’s really over for these guys. That article is an intentional clarion call from the NYT. They hit everything:
- I’ll start with the best: openly laying out with plenty of evidence that university administrations are attempting massive resistance against anti-affirmative action rulings. They print among many other things a direct confession: “One of the misconceptions about Prop 2 is that it inhibited our faculty searches by not allowing us to search based on race and gender or offer financial aid based on race and gender,” [National-level DEI product-seller] said at a Michigan D.E.I. event last year. “We just had to pivot to be more creative.”
- Demonstrating that the policies are widely disliked by a “silent majority.” I really can’t think of a more succinctly descriptive term for what it is.
- Using terminology like “DEI bureaucracy,” “distinctive jargon,” and absolutely knowing what they were doing when they included: “The Black Law Students Association issued further demands, including mandatory antiracism training, more mental health counseling and the hiring of a professor in critical race theory.”
- Citing critical sources throughout, and distinctively not taking university figures at face value. There’s no sense of a “blue wall of silence” here from one big, uh, blue-coded institution to another.
- A subsequent section that consists mostly of examples of absolute nonsense from 2020 and thereabouts.
- A conclusion largely about the October 7th-aftermath protest grotesqueries on campus.
I’m not sure how much more of an official stamp you can get on the idea that DEI can be criticized again. I predict that plenty of people in that industry should start polishing their resumes, as the trend shifting distinctly to “out” will dry up any investment in that sector.
This is to say nothing of how relieving it is to be seeing this bullshit finally run its course.
It's crazy to compare this to the way businesses are screened and tested for bias or discrimination. Nearly all the focus is on unintentional discrimination, because few people believe that for-profit businesses intentionally discriminate as a goal in-and-of-itself. So people look for things like correlations, ie, you offer different prices or services to your lowest income customers, your lowest income customers are probably less White, ergo, racism.
But in Academia they really are just intentionally, flat-out, going for discrimination.
The $64,000 question is whether the Supreme Court has the stomach to fight it for 20 years. Massive resistance can be very effective unless the Court is really willing to take lots of cases and get into the details.
Don't really see "massive resistance" despite what you may hear from the usual blowhards. Harvard has taken seriously the need to retreat from overly agressive DEI and to push back against demands to take progressive political stands on everything. Over the summer I noticed they had taken to keeping most gates locked in order to prevent encampments on the part of protesters. Many colleges are fighting for financial survival in the post-Covid era and beginning to understand they do not have the luxury of using campuses to fight culture wars.
That is a different issue from hiring committees trying to diversify their academic disciplines, which is definitely how a lot of people on the committees want to think.
To fight what? Illegal affirmative action in higher-ed? Doesn't the Supreme Court just take lawsuits that are brought to them? Maybe I just have no idea how SCOTUS works.
The Court decides what cases to take. No one is entitled to have their case heard by the Supreme Court.* It takes the votes of 4 justices for the Court to take up a case.
*There are very narrow exceptions, I think including disputes between states and cases involving certain diplomat-type folks.
"because few people believe that for-profit businesses intentionally discriminate as a goal in-and-of-itself"
Sure, but lots of people believe that PEOPLE do this. A for-profit business needs to not only control for unconscious bias, but also for bad actors who act in their own personal self-interest instead of in the firm's best interest.
In lots of places, you can easily throw a tennis ball and have it land on some company that hires sub-optimal talent because the people in that company discriminate quite intentionally. As an example, my wife recently interviewed for a job where they flat out said that they want to hire a woman (and no, there was absolutely nothing about this job where any reasonable person could conclude that gender was relevant to success).
Sure - my head is in the rules-based, algorithmic or automatic decision making space because that's what I work with.
There may be individual people at any place who are subjectively putting their thumbs on the scales, and there must be a lot of subjectivity in college admissions. But they also have large doses or rules and procedures and scoring in their design, and that's what I was primarily thinking of.
I went back to school in 2018 and got to experience peak DEI. It was miserable. You’d think from the DEI presentations that every white person is a fucking moron who never saw or thought about a minority in their lives. You couldn’t skip all of them either—you needed to get some number of “diversity credits” to stay in good standing. And while I don’t know that anyone would have gotten in trouble for speaking out per se, the environment was far too coercive for serious discussion of the harm of DEI. It was something that even liberal students found insufferable and one of the main wedges that lured me into Republican politics before I came to my senses later (which, I’m sure not coincidentally, happened alongside a decline in the popularity and clout of DEI).
I may be extrapolating too much from my own experiences, but I think a lot of people seriously underestimate how harmful a lot of DEI initiatives are in trying to build winning coalitions and bring talented, hard-working people of all stripes into liberal politics. A LOT of the presentations went soaring over the line from “informing about previous acts of oppression” into straight up anti-white racism. More than once I wondered how utterly cancelled and fired these people would be if they said the same things about black people. And while a smarmy millennial ignorantly lecturing you about misbehavior she assumes of you because you’re white is certainly small potatoes compared to the historical injustices of slavery and the civil rights era, it’s still an unwarranted attack on your basic dignity as a person that drives people into the arms of the first opportunist to capitalize. These same people breathlessly wonder how orange idiot man could be so appealing…
About ten years ago I went through a graduate program that included a mandatory social justice class. The class was a mixture of principal certificate-seeking educators, nursing students, and social justice majors(!).
The latter group created such a refrain of “of course a white/cis/straight person would say that” - I think specifically of a time they were mad about a reading of how Bobby Kennedy helped Caesar Chavez - that by the end of the course there was a clear us/them divide that educators & nurses would kid on the square that the class has succeeded in making us all more conservative.
The biggest qualm I have with anti-racist framings is that they categorize some people as inherently good and other people as inherently bad based off of visual and immutable characteristics. What further compounds the anti-rational framework is that there is nothing those assigned the pejorative label can do to absolve themselves or leave their assigned group. The whole framework does not care about individual actions, agency, or intention.
Kendi's one good idea is actually that we should stop labeling people as "racist" or not, and worry more about what actions are racist. Unfortunately he then goes on to try to redefine "racist" in an expansive and unhelpful way and some other shit, but that first idea is kind of the opposite of what you're saying (and what many progressives seem to practice)!
Didn't disagree with much substantially in your post.
But I'll just note that its the people who have been subjected to the most obnoxious DEI initiatives (whether at universities or in white collar professions) are the people have moved increasingly in the Democratic column.
I may be speaking only for myself, but I sort of find the DEI discussion very closely correlated to crime discussion (sometimes for ugly reasons which I'll get to). So in 2020 and 2021 there became a big uptick in stories about rising crime. And thing is, crime really did rise. And unfortunately too many far lefties denied this rise which had the perverse effect of pushing people right in the 2022 midterms (at least in NY). Also had the perverse effect of helping turn people away from what I still think are worthwhile initiatives like bail reform; think the "evidence" that bail reform caused the crime spike to be extremely wanting, but if the same people shouting loudest for bail reform are also denying crime was rising at all, can see how that could lead voters to conclude bail reform is a problem. So yeah, if you live in a super lefty area where lots of people talk a big game about "defund the police", can see how that can leave a real sour taste in your mouth. But then I turn on my tv and I see the mayor of New York say crime has never been worse in his life; an absurd statement for someone who as a cop in the late 80s. I see on Fox News stories that imply or outright say that cities are "escape from New York" hell holes. And then I see Tom Cotton using these stories to advocate for a truly authoritarian anti-crime agenda and I say to myself "you know what. As much as too many lefties got over their skies in 2020 and 2021, it pales in comparison to the ugly ideas coming from the other side. And oh yeah, the far lefty "defund the police" types have way less power than the orange man leader who has a real shot of becoming president again.
Think the DEI stuff is sort of same bucket. You have this nauseating initiatives on college campuses and some offices around the country. But then you have scare stories about how DEI is taking over America. And now you have a presidential candidate calling Kamal Harris a "DEI hire" https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/team-trump-calls-kamala-harris-dei-hire-rcna164117....clearly using DEI as this catch all pejorative and clearly aping Lee Atwater's famous observation to the Atlantic back in the 80s. Which again puts me in the position of saying "as annoying as DEI is, the right is making this out to be this all powerful boogeyman so out of proportion to it's actual real world impact".
I went to a single DEI program in November of last year, which promised to explain the simple and morally clear history of (checks notes) the war in Gaza, in terms of European imperialism and colonialism that exploited the poor little European Jews and harmed the poor little Arab Jews.
Yes. Really. It actually happened. The lecture was given by a guy from the History department who studied Ottoman history and, frankly, did not know how to deal with any facts that didn't fit his frame of bad Europeans coming and oppressing good Arabs.
That would be an extremely...unusual position for someone who was a professor of Ottoman history, which very much does not fit that frame, in any way, unless he'd decided the Ottoman's themselves were 'European' which is a complicated and pretty useless question?
The way the headline figures in that article are being cited seems a bit problematic. Apparently they spent $250m over 8-9 years. Call it $30m a year. The university's budget is apparently $13b a year. So they spent ~0.2-0.25% of their budget on DEI. Organisations waste larger shares of their resources all the time.
While I was looking up their budget, Wiki told me UMichigan employs 2.9 administrative staff for every academic staff member. I don't know anything about running a university but I don't recall ever seeing an organisation that's even close to 3 support staff for every front-line employee. So potentially the resource allocation problem goes way beyond any particular issues with how the DEI budget is operated.
The article and the statistics noted above just bring me back to a point Matt has made repeatedly about too many Democrat initiatives regarding public services and the economy in general; should your policies be about creating jobs over and above anything else. From 2008 to probably around 2017-2018 this made sense (if I'm not mistaken layoffs from state and local governments was a pretty big part of the reason labor market still had a lot of slack circa 2011-2015). To narrow down to local government, Matt has made a pretty persuasive case to me that if people (like me) want to convince the public at large that higher taxes for public services is a good tradeoff than we have actually have to prioritize the services aspect of government over the making jobs aspect.
What does this have to do with Michigan and DEI. I think we need to see explosion of administrative functions in colleges and DEI jobs at least in part as a jobs program for liberal arts majors. The reality is, colleges are probably producing too many liberal arts degrees (and I say this as someone who has a History degree and personally laments the decline of the History major). And unless you want to complete reorient your career trajectory like I did, you need to find some way to use what's ultimately not a degree that has much demand in the private sector. Think this is dynamic is directly tied to number of DEI jobs and administrative jobs exploding.
Believe it or not I think this is related to my posts about Affirmative Action. There is a tension between the institutions that colleges were in a pre-modern economy (finishing schools for the rich) and what they are now (increasingly necessary training centers for modern world). With the affirmative action example, there is tension between an elite college's supposed commitment to progressive values and the fact it's still in too many ways still just a finishing school for the rich (hence legacy admission still existing and hence why places like Harvard don't double their number of students which would actually be a commitment to progressive values). In the DEI example, in much the same way that needing to know Latin and Greek is no longer a major part of college experience, I think there needs to be a rethink as to how many of these liberal arts degree programs are actually worthwhile and needed (and I say this as someone who thinks something like Gender studies is way more valuable than learning Greek or Latin).
As someone who teaches at a liberal arts college, I think there is big misconception about what liberal arts colleges actually do: a majority of students are science majors -- bio, chem, physics, bio-chem, psychological science -- social science majors, business majors and comp-sci majors. Liberal arts schools require more courses in general education (a broad range of disciplines) but not that much more than a traditional R1 institution. In fact, R1 institutions also have general education requirements that largely mirror the general education requirements at liberal arts college. So, to recap, liberals arts colleges aren't only Humanities-based colleges. At my college, the number of gender studies majors is miniscule, which is how it should be, in my opinion. I teach film in the English department and we have small numbers, as it should be. There is too much elite overproduction.
And there has been a significant increase in administration hires at our college since 1994, when the faculty salary pool matched the administrative salary pool. Currently, the admin salary pool is three times as large as the faculty pool.
I think DEI at my college is very expensive and not at all effective or productive. It would have been better if we simply gave all the money for consultants, administrators, and workshop leaders to poor people. College is too late to address economic disparity -- we need better economic solutions to poverty that address issues at the root level, even before the student is born, like building generational wealth, etc.
I liked and agree with the broader points of this comment, but I disagree about gender studies v classics. Call me ridiculous (or just old), but reading Virgil in Latin was a mind-blowing experience for me (as an undergrad at Michigan).
I'm working on a research project at UM now, and while there is certainly a lot of admin/different framing to what I experienced in the previous millennium, I'm not sure it's worse than in other places, including other places I've worked (such as the NYC government).
I think there’s probably an argument to be had about Gender Studies circa 2005 vs 2024. I know for sure the discipline has undergone massive changes in focus and curricula, and I’m not sure (ha) it’s been for the better on balance.
My big take away is that DEI created a bunch of unfunded program and paperwork mandates that are orthogonal to people whose jobs should be research and teaching.
Well, at the U of M, DEI is clearly a funded mandate, which is the problem. But normally, I agree with you that DEI is largely an unfunded mandate, which is bad, but not much better than a funded mandate that isn't proven to be effective. And, in fact, DEI has been largely proven to be counter-productive.
While I overall agree that DEI is a big waste of everything, I think Binya's point is well-taken. Certainly the gigantic ballooning of university administrations started long before DEI was around.
I think these are separate issues. People's complaints with DEI programs aren't solely (or even primarily) about the overall cost, so highlighting their low proportional cost doesn't really address the arguments against them.
I think the ballooning of admin budgets at universities (coupled with people's concerns about the parallel ballooning of cost for students) is an absolutely legitimate issue that needs to be addressed. But that's separate from the DEI issue, and not really related in a meaningful way IMHO.
The article chose to highlight the cost of the department, and do so in a way that made it seem like an objectively large number (highlighting the per-decade cost not the per-year cost).
As I stated in my responses to Binya, I don't think that the highlighting of the total cost was inaccurate or irrelevant or misleading. The amount can be both a) a large amount of money, and b) a small amount of their overall budget- there's nothing inconsistent or misleading about that.
If the federal government was wasting $10 billion on a program that is hugely unpopular and doesn't seem to be achieving any of its goals (quite the opposite), I think that responding to criticisms of the amount by saying that it's just a tiny portion of the overall federal budget wouldn't really address in any way the complaint that people were lodging. And if someone said "this wasteful program has cost $10 billion!!" most people would understand that to be a lot of wasted money, regardless of how much money the government spends in total.
I think the argument you're making goes the other way. Given the myriad harms listed in the article, as well as discussed elsewhere (including on this substack over the years), not to mention the ways in which Republicans have been able to weaponize DEI as a real political cudgel, the low level of funding seems to be causing wildly disproportionate harms. It's like saying "sure, this heroin I'm ingesting is less than 1% of my overall caloric intake each day, so therefore it's not a very big deal to my health."
I feel I didn't comment on DEI either way, and I was making a narrow comment on the way a figure was being cited. Relaxing one's epistemological standards when arguing for positions one agrees with is bad.
And I think that presenting the cost as the total spend is a fair way to present the figure given the failure of the programs to achieve their goals, as well as the ways in which the programs have caused significant harms. It's not they're neutrally wasteful- they're actively harmful.
I don't think it's a fair rebuttal to say "this program that costs tens of millions of dollars annually is only a tiny amount of the overall budget so therefore saying it's a lot of money is not accurate." But if you do want to do that, I think comparing it to the overall budget is equally unfair. Compare it to the budgets of the areas in which it's being implemented to get a good sense of how much it's impacting the particular programs that the funds could otherwise be allocated to.
By way of example- I work for a large municipal executive agency, and it's budget time right now. We have to make cuts due to the fiscal environment facing just about every municipal government in the country. I can promise you that we're not looking at programs that amount to less than 1% of the overall municipal budget and shrugging our shoulders. Heck, we're not looking at programs that are 1% of our own AGENCY budget and shrugging our shoulders. There are lots of things that are tiny parts of our overall budget that are hugely expensive and incredibly relevant to examine for efficiency's sake and to try and make sure we can provide necessary services with the money we actually have available. So dismissing the statement that these are incredibly costly programs by saying "not relative to EVERYTHING UM spends money on" doesn't strike me as a good way to think about the financial costs, let alone the social costs.
I truly wasn't trying to advocate for shrugging shoulders. I stand by my view that a 0.25% of budget line item is, by the laws of arithmetic, far from unusual, and this reality is being somewhat misrepresented as taking the unusual step of quoting it over a 8-9 year period.
If the spending is harmful, it doesn't matter if it's big or small, it should stop. Sensible people don't allocate resources to activities that cause harm. But that's a separate question.
"If the spending is harmful, it doesn't matter if it's big or small, it should stop. Sensible people don't allocate resources to activities that cause harm. But that's a separate question."
Just to be clear then, the objection is to the description of $250 million over 10 years as being a "staggering" amount of money to allocate for these purposes?
Again, going through budgetary reviews now, and I can tell you that we view 0.25% of our budget as both a small proportion of our overall budget AND an incredibly large amount of actual money, so I would disagree with you on your point, but I want to make sure I'm correctly interpreting it here. There are lots of things that make up 0.25% of an enormous budget, but if the budget is enormous enough then describing things that cost 0.25% of it a staggering amount can still be fair IMHO.
As a faculty member at a research university who's worked at multiple R1 universities over the past 14 years, I would caution that you need to dig into the numbers a bit more for context. Again according to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Michigan#Finances), Michigan gets 3% of its budget from the State, and another 11% from tuition and fees. Of the remaining 86%, 10.4% is research funding, most of which goes to paying research staff, grad students, and postdocs who I'm guessing are mostly not classified as academic staff. 58.2% of the budget is auxiliary funds, the vast majority of which are either Michigan Medicine or athletics, both of which are primarily self-funding.
So a huge chunk of those administrative staff aren't leeching off the funding that should be in the classroom - they are fulfilling the research and/or patient care enterprises.
Setting those aside, you also have to consider the enormous growth in the IT needed to successfully run a university. The course management system, the registration systems, classroom instructional design, negotiating and managing and support for licensed software and databases, the university's websites. You need people outside the classroom to run those things. If you fired all the IT department your administrative/academic staff ratio would decline, but I guarantee both students and faculty would miss them.
We could lay off all the development staff but then there wouldn't be anyone to raise money from alumni for student scholarships.
At a university, the administrative staff doesn’t just support front-line employees. They support the students. Many of them are frontline for non-teaching purposes.
I have been thinking about that...I guess US universities also provide students with housing, healthcare, food, police...so it's probably hard to compare with a more typical organisation which provides a more standalone service.
This may be neither here nor there, but, in the past, I think a lot of tasks that are currently handled by administrators were handled by teachers/professors. I'm thinking about counseling (both career and personal counseling), policy-making for the university, dorm supervision (maybe still being done by faculty members?).
It's interesting because opinions among professors vary on this. My wife used to work as an academic advisor at Marquette University in Milwaukee and I would say the majority of professors she worked with were pleased that they weren't advising students on course selection, credit load, etc. This tended to be the case with professors in STEM fields. The humanities professors were still mostly pro-advisor but a larger share of them wanted to still handle advising. This could be a unique to Marquette thing so I don't intend to draw any broad conclusions, but it was interesting.
The only other point I'll make about administrative bloat is that some of these positions do provide services that students appreciate, expect, and utilize. Tutoring and supplemental instruction programs come to mind. This is not to say that all of these programs are sacrosanct it's more akin to Matt's point about media flaws largely being the fault of audience expectations. A lot of families and prospective college students are expecting these services and that makes this a harder discussion.
They figured out one weird trick to constantly vote themselves more jobs. It’s not some response to a need, it’s just institutional capture. They’ll invent a need, hire people to fill it, and then gain a larger constituency. Rinse, repeat.
I would probably calculate it as two proportions, of the “student services” bucket and of the “admin” bucket.
It’s probably a more obscene percentage of the former. When people talk about stupid progbrain admin it’s usually a cultural thing, the fact that there are simply too many administrative personnel seems to be a pretty universal and non-partisan observation at a lot of corporations and even universities now.
Plus, spending isn't the right way to think about an initiative like this. It doesn't cost anything to tell all your existing staff to "do this DEI thing". The focus of the article is the ubiquity of how DEI has worked into all aspects of the University. The spending is just on the training and minimizes the extent of the work.
The average cost for an in-state UM undergraduate is about $35k-40k. There are currently 33k undergraduates attending UM. So that $30 million each year could go towards paying the entirety of the tuitions of the ~750 poorest in-state students or half the tuition of the ~1,500 poorest in-state students. Or take ~$900 off every undergraduate's tuition or just give every undergraduate ~$900 to just spend however they want. All those options seem like better uses of that $30 million per year than spending it on DEI bureaucracy.
>I don't know anything about running a university but I don't recall ever seeing an organisation that's even close to 3 support staff for every front-line employee.<
These days that's the rule, not the exception, in US universities, I'm pretty sure.
When I first encountered DEI when applying for academic jobs back in the U.S., I saw it as a transparent rent seeking and consultancy effort. It was not aimed at ameliorating material problems. What I find interesting in the NYT piece (so far, halfway through) is how the omnicause has contributed to the DEI backlash.
One thing that bothers me about all the DEI statements and initiatives are all the wasted hours candidates put in when they were never going to be considered for immutable factors and when the reports didn’t matter to those in charge.
Right, that's what the NYT article actually showed: a bunch of the time, when some undergrads mobilized to make "demands" of university administrators, they were being coached, encouraged, and materially supported by other branches of the university administration. It was bureaucrat-on-bureaucrat warfare.
I currently work in a DOD research lab within a university system and we had to do the standard university new-hire training that professors and administrators all had to do. We had to do all the standard diversity and anti-discrimination training which, even though it was mostly common sense, was perfectly reasonable and not too long. It was the standard stuff about understanding that people come from different background and hold different views and customs and it's important to respect that and that you do your part to help create an inclusive and welcoming environment.
But after that, tacked onto the end of the new-hire training was the "DEI" training. Did it actually cover anything practical that the previous training mentioned above didn't? No, but it was much more aggressive and confrontational than the other training and used all the popular DEI buzzwords like "microaggressions", "antiracism", and "white supremacy" mixed into various word salads. It didn't change my views on anything in any way. It did waste a couple hours of my day (~$100-200 of taxpayer money) that could have been better spent actually learning how to do my job, although I'm sure it made lots of money for the people who made the glossy presentations and videos.
“ Gilbert reported the dispute with Lyons to administrators, but was unhappy with how the school handled her concerns. After Floyd’s killing, she decided to detail her experiences on Twitter.”
The weaponizing of offense and using DEIwashing to justify lying and lashing out at an English professor is saddening.
This wasn't just acedemia. My firm had a large DEI department in 2020, and it no longer exists today (this isn't to say all DEI initiatives are gone, some of them are just part of regular HR now). I am sure a lot of other folks have similar stories.
DEI is important for organizations, in a "table stakes" way. Hiring whole teams for it seems a bit nuts, though, in the way that if you hired a whole team and made them responsible for "Honesty and Transparency" or such. I think if you worked at any firm that had an "Honesty and Transparency" department, you'd probably be inclined to think a couple of things:
- people who work here are not very honest, and probably do not communicate transparently, and that seems kind of like a red flag
- people who work here probably dislike the Honesty and Transparency department people
- I kind of doubt the people in the Honestly and Transparency department are experts in honesty or transparency.
Skimmed the article, and I could already tell that things were going bad there at the beginning of it when I saw they were using Tema Okun's bad material. Also, I'm eagerly awaiting to see if diversity statements at public institutions get struck down as a First Amendment violation.
But overall, I really think that people that are hyperobsessive about this might have won some battles in the beginning, but will lose the war because they'll be seen by others as being real assholes for pushing these tensions, and end up as people that no one wants to be around or to hire.
When the intention of said statement are to compel speech that conforms with a narrow set of normative political beliefs, then they are plausibly a first amendment violation.
I wonder if schools that use these documents as an affirmative action proxy are going to “lose” all these documents from applications after they get sued?
> but will lose the war because they'll be seen by others as being real assholes for pushing these tensions, and end up as people that no one wants to be around or to hire.
Which is too bad as we probably need these people vocally and publicly pushing back to make progress. And I say this as a "head-in-the-sand" sort of academic who just plays along to the degree my conscience allows.
It's all just a huge distraction. Our system has nothing to do with training for marketable skills --> career growth --> financial security --> fulfilling life and everything to do with complaining about the rules, and jobs for rules oversight.
It would be like if a UK soccer academy took focus off of physical soccer development in place of finding a bunch of sensitive theatre kids that hate soccer to become bureaucratic team and league officials to constantly scrutinize any actual playing of soccer, declare everything unfair, and lobby for change.
The priority needs to be on human development for success in the marketplace. I agree fully that progressives have no clue about black people. They think everyone is Noah Tanenbaum from the Sopranos.
“Michigan has poured roughly a quarter of a billion dollars into D.E.I. since 2016…”
Pretty astonishing.
“‘D.E.I. here is absolutely well intentioned, extremely thoughtful in its conception and design…But it’s so virtuous that it’s escaped accountability in a lot of ways.’”
As a Latin American, the way some people talk about us as if we were a single block with single set of beliefs has always struck me as, at best, excessively reductive.
The people surprised at the conservative beliefs of Hispanics clearly don't have much exposure to the communities that make it up.
I've just been to Spain for a couple of weeks and been surrounded by people who speak Spanish and whose skin colour would probably count as "brown" to most white Americans - at least, they do in late September/early October, when the summer tans are at their height - but who are also inarguably "white". It really does rub home how utterly unrelated to reality the American racial categories actually are. Not to say that other countries' racial categories are any more related to reality!
Most white people do manage to notice that white people aren't a single block with a single set of beliefs, and it would be nice if they'd realise that the same applies to all the other races too.
I guess it would be nice if White people noticed it more, just like it would be nice if Americans of all census categories noticed this more, but it's not like this categorization has been imposed on Hispanics by outsiders. Many of the politicians and organizers who decided to create Hispanic as a census category were Hispanic. Just like many Hispanic politicians continue to make the decision to organize politics around the Hispanic category.
It was a choice made to benefit Hispanics by raising numbers at a time when numbers were lower, and made at a time (I'm thinking 60s-80s) where it was thought that most Mexican-Americans and Puerto Ricans and others really did share enough commonalities that it made sense.
I'm pretty sure the story behind 'Hispanic' as a Census category was that the Feds got literally 6 or 8 people in a room and that's what they came out with. I can't remember where I read that so grain of salt, but it wasn't like there was a big public consensus about it.
I mean, you're correct on the one hand that it wasn't "a big public consensus," but there were absolutely Hispanic political activists who were pushing for the category to be created: https://www.latinousa.org/2014/05/02/invention-hispanics/
There's definitely some amount of tacit acceptance that continues though. For everybody who is personally annoyed by it, there may be another that thinks "if I was counted as Peruvian-American I'd barely be noticed".
Also - I'm typically touting the fact that assimilation, diversity and racial depolarization are accelerating, but there are still communities where mergers of Hispanic ethnicities is a thing. When I was back in Reading, PA, recently, there lots of stores geared towards Latinos and Spanish-language speakers. Most of those places aren't trying to appeal to smaller niches. I'm sure you can find "Mexican music night" at various clubs and bars, but more ethnically generic versions are much more common.
Sure. Now in Miami, LA, NYC it’s very different, though. Coming from Memphis where all the “Hispanic” people were from Mexico and northern Central America, when I moved to Miami I was impressed by the whole diversity that comprises the label. no one would have just identified as Hispanic or Latino but their actual former nationality, and there was a plethora of great food from specific places in Latin America.
You're still talking about us as if we're a single entity.
It was a decision by *some* Hispanics who stood to benefit from it. But it's not a label that we all accept or identify with. For many of us it was imposed on.
I apologize, but my excuse is it's almost impossible to expediently talk about political trends without using clunky labels. If we say "democrats did X" it never means all Democrats did it or agreed with it.
My point to Richard was that it wasn't a bunch of White people that imposed this label from on high. Many of the people that created this label, if not most of them, were people who fit the "Hispanic" category. I'm not sure what level of support it may have had among average people at the time, but my guess is larger than now because Hispanic people (again, with apologies) were voting very similarly, like Black people still do today, as a group.
In 2024 "Hispanic" looks much sillier because the range of people the label covers is more obviously super-diverse, covering so many different national origins, political views, skin colors, language skills, immigrant backgrounds, etc... Some diversity was there 40 years ago but on average the range was lower.
No need to apologize. Just wanted to point out that there's disagreement over it within the Hispanic/Latin community, and some of us do think it was imposed on us, even if ultimately we end up using it for the same expediency reasons you list. Also agreed it made more sense 40 years ago than now.
Sure. I mean, I think the US has far too few racial/ethnic census categories and should have vastly more. At the very least, the 574 tribes should each have one and there should be at least one for every other country in the world (so at least 200 of those, but most countries have internal divisions so likely more like 500+), plus a wide variety of “mixed” groups. Plus some left-over categories, like ADOS and “lots of different European immigrant origins but so mixed I can’t really tell / don’t really care”, etc.
I think that imposing a standard grouping on those (ie defining which are “white” and which “Black” and which “Asian”) is a mistake - if you just have people say “Syrian Arab” or “Druze”, or “Lebanese Maronite” and then don’t have an official decision of whether that’s “white” or “Asian” or something else (“Arab”?) and then let all the organisations decide which groups they want to organise around.
If you want to be a Hispanic political organisation, then you write a list of which categories you want to count as Hispanic and different organisations don’t have to agree with each other.
It annoys me that you have giant census-created categories - and so do we! This isn’t a US-specific complaint. Why the hell isn’t there a “White (American”) on the UK census and a separate “White (Canadian)”? But I think it’s important to remember that they are giant categories created by the census and that the map is not the territory.
It would be easy enough with technology to just let people on the Census list what race(s) and ethnicit(y/ies) they are, and then people can merge them into broader categories if they wish after the fact. I also strongly agree there should be an ADOS category.
This is the sort of thing that could be done in the 2030 census if there was a smart way to have large language models parse free form data into whatever categories a particular researcher wants to work with (with some appropriate privacy safeguards). I would not be surprised if the 2040 census does something like this.
This would work for some academic purpose, but the general population is not going to be able to remember hundreds of categories for people. They will naturally consolidate into 3-10 groups at most.
Any time you put people into groups larger than one person you will get blurring of the differences. Some may object to "Hispanics" as a category but how often do we see "Caucasian" as a category as well?
I guess everyone could be their own group but then we get into the Walt Whitman problem and every single individual containing multitudes. Ultimately we're led to quantum theory and madness.
The US census codes Hispanic separately from race for the exact reason you describe. It's all the usual races (white, black, Pacific islander, etc), and then a separate question if you are "Hispanic of any race".
But fwiw, it's more common to take that census data and encode Hispanic as an exclusive racial category when performing or presenting analysis. The poll results in Matt's post today seem to do that.
There's been a lot of efforts by these people to make People Of Color a singular political omnibloc, despite ironically ignoring the vast diversity among these people, as you observe.
How many articles do we have to read about how Latin Americans do not like being called "latinx" before white people stop insisting that this is appropriate language?
The thing about terms like "latinx" is that it wasn't white people pushing it, it was highly-educated non-white people often in academic circles doing that and it gained credibility among white liberals for that reason.
And that's part of the problem: you often have these highly educated non-white academics and activists who claim to represent the best interests even though they are often as wildly out of touch with the people they claim to represent as us white liberals.
That's my take on it as well. White progressives are often taking their racial cues, including language, from their non-white peers in their social and academic circles - who are also uber-progressive on these matters. In progressive circles, BIPOC progressives typically hold the most status, power and influence and it is more or less ordained so by the progressive "hierarchies" of whose voices are "centered" and such - but it is white progressives that are higher in number and more visible as a result, so there is this sort of belief that progressivism itself is an ideology solely of the highly educated/academic/professional urban whites and being imposed on otherwise non-racially interested "working class" non-whites.
The reality is a bit more complicated, progressivism is an ideology of academia for sure, but "BIPOC", particularly in the sectors of academia most steeped with "DEI" philosophy and activism, are heavily present in how the ideology and language and activism is shaped and shipped downhill, and it is the white progressives that are often taking their cues from these non-white centers of the movement, and there are varying degrees of how much these "BIPOC" representatives in academic and elite circles a) come from the same backgrounds of the communities they claim to represent class-wise, culturally and sometimes ethnically (there is a high proportion of Black students at elite universities that are the children of wealthy Nigerian and/or Haitian immigrants/nationals and not necessarily of middle/working class African-American backgrounds), and b) even if so, when they get to university how much/how little their perspectives are with their home communities. It's not just white kids from the small town that go to university and come back steeped in new (and sometimes radical) ideas and cultures, but their minority peers that make it into these circles may also do the completely normal college kid thing of adapting "radical chic" when away and differentiating quite a bit from their hometown peers and family, and when this is of course highly encouraged by the university itself to become much more "radical" and "conscious" ahem "woke" in ones approach to race and identity, specifically for "BIPOC" students, it's not difficult to see how this divide begins to happen.
It's become a meme of convenience particularly for conservatives/DEI opponents to portray progressivism/DEI and politically unpopular "language" devices like "Latinx" as stemming from their most powerful (and despised) political opponents (urban white liberal Democrats) and being imposed on unwilling communities of non-whites because it allows conservatives to attack these ideas and movements without having to necessarily attack non-whites (an always dicey proposition for conservatives given the association of conservatism with racism as an attack target for its own opponents, let alone the propensity of a lot of right wing critique on minority activism and issues to end up in racist tropes), in fact, in their telling of it, they are the true "allies" versus the fake and disconnected white liberals. Conservatives are obviously a lot more comfortable attacking Robin D'Angelo as the avatar of DEI excess, but D'Angelo is really just parroting the ideas and scholarship of a lot of Black "race theory" scholars and activists, pathologizing "whiteness" for example was definitely not invented by D'Angelo - in fact that was some of the basis of the accusations of plagiarism in D'Angelo's work ;p
In reality though it is really an educational/class/social/political divide over a racial divide. Highly educated particularly academic/institutional types are very progressive across all racial categories, and working class/middle class types are less so, across all racial categories - but numerically speaking, there are just more progressive whites than non-whites in most contexts so it can seem at the surface to be a top-down "white" ideology, but that really misunderstands the in-dynamics of progressive and activist groups and institutions along the "progressive intersectional hierarchy".
"Latinx" as I understand it did come from the "intersectional" alliances of campus and activist "La Raza" and other progressive Hispanic advocacy type groups from their LGBTQ members. It picked up traction across other academic and activist groups for the same reasons of "intersectionality" and their own in-group dynamics of racial/ethnic/issue progressive advocates that happen to also have a much higher proportion of LGBTQ representatives in those groups than in their broader communities because of the "intersectionality" of progressive racial and LGBTQ advocacy, and the somewhat obvious factor that of course LGBTQ members of these communities are going to find more comfort and acceptance with their more progressive and educated peers to engage with the activism and representation of their community they want to have, without perhaps some of the less accepting environments of their communities outside of academia etc. And of course since the types of minorities that the majority of academic/highly educated/institutional white progressives will have contact with are minorities of the same milieu, and those minorities are also highly progressive and traffic in the same terms (and police those terms often aggressively), stuff like "Latinx" becomes coin of the realm - acceptable and encouraged for (and maybe even punished for not) using the term in those groups and all their output, but unpopular with minorities outside of it, and in terms of which social pressure has more influence, if you're a white progressive employed at a university or progressive media outlet, you're a lot more susceptible to the demands and preferences of your minority colleagues than those of the small business owners and manual laborers you rarely come into contact with on a personal basis, and for whom "Latinx" is a silly affect that they might have heard some of their kids and grandkids that went to University occasionally use when they come home on breaks (and maybe roll their eyes at) but not part of their normal discourse.
Basically - it's the academia minority progressives that are often out of touch with their own communities on the language and priorities of their activism, and white progressives often don't have the personal experience to differentiate that the members of the Black Student Alliance at Columbia may have much different social-cultural-politics and backgrounds than that of the nearby Black working class - often living in just a few square miles of these locations but might as well be in a different time zone sometimes, culturally and politically speaking.
All to say - the progressive movement would be doing itself a lot of favors to break out of its institutional and social bubbles if it wants to have real odds at being an effective political movement, and lose a lot of the self defeating stuff that makes it toxic or just plain silly. The referenced NY Times piece quoted an absurd anecdote of a university department concerned that its gardens and arboretum weren't attracting more non-white students and public because of the "Latin" genus-species naming of the plants (and then seeking to "correct" that by introducing a set or ridiculous alternatives that would be even more esoteric for the average American than the Latin plant name, like what the heck is "Two Eyed Seeing" as a means to identify plants lol who "identifies" with that "way of seeing nature" in the Michigan U region, let alone even heard of this term?), when in reality, it's because it's location is not very accessible without a car from the university proper. It's the same stupidity tying up societies like the Audobon society (also subject to renaming lol) - the small number of non-white bird enthusiast members is because many bird species are named after "white colonizers" and maybe *gasp* some slave owners from 200 years ago, and not the also similar problems of access and a much harder to quantify "free time" to spend bird watching that people who are predominantly working class (which is a lot of of minorities) have a lot less of. But rather than put their resources into trying to address those much more tactical problems (maybe do some birding outreach in schools, provide busses or walking tours for "urban birding" etc), they're renaming birds while being absurdly strident about the "white supremacy" nature of birding itself and creating a lot of divisiveness within this relatively already tiny society, and I guarantee you that not one single working class Black person who has any inkling of interest in birds is even paying attention to, let alone would even associate the names of a bird like "cardinal" to some racist origin as a reason to not get into birding, and is certainly not being provided with any tangible means to explore the hobby in the meantime ;p. But that is the "progressivism" that happens when it becomes an insular class/social thing, and when that class/social caste becomes driven by "woke" without any effective external controls, renaming the "Audobon Society" away from its "colonialist white supremacist" origins takes on life and importance, and yes there are (the few) "Black birders" in the society that are pushing this with their white "allies", like trying to force down "Latinx" (and the gendered Spanish language as a whole) some "intersectional" stake in the ground, pushed by a demographically outsized dominated LGBTQ Hispanic activism/campus set and their allies.
I’ve nearly always heard usage of this terminology being driven by people who speak Spanish natively, but who have (or are in the process of earning) phds.
"it reflects the fact that younger people are growing up in a less racist, more integrated society [...] as a broad social trend, it’s change for the better."
I just really want to highlight how much I agree with this, and how it should be seen as such an obviously good thing no matter what. I'm very happy Matt made this point explicit.
Religious conflict is often codified as racial conflict, however. There's plenty of anti-islamic sentiment based in legitimate dislike of some of Islam's tenets, but there's also a lot of people who don't actually know much about Islam, but dislike brown people.
I’m sure it’s a much smaller effect than abortion, but one thought I had during the 2020-21 progressive abolish ICE/ border guards are evil heyday was: “uh- have you seen who actually staffs ICE in places like Texas and Arizona? Pretty heavily Hispanic. Do you think that this rhetoric might be a little alienating to them?”
I think the point Charles is making is that it's not all that clear that handing out goodies to the 10% is actually helping get votes with the 10%.
I have no doubt there are a number of Teamsters members who are unhappy that Sean O'Brien came out loud and proud for Trump. But there is no way O'Brien is giving this very public support to Trump if he thought this would create a huge backlash among his members. The fact he felt comfortable doing this is a pretty good piece of evidence that he thinks majority of his union are voting for Trump.
Perhaps, it's time to completely dump unions, who embody rent seeking, and double down on expanding and improving EITC and OSHA. Worker safety and financial security are fine goals and need not be restricted to specific rent seeking arrangements.
I think that's going way too far and even just in political terms unions still provide Dems needed electoral and organizing muscle. However, the smaller the percentage of people in unions gets and the less those in unions stay aligned with Dem politics and priorities, the less incentive there is for Dems to cater to unions.
Neither of those agency/programs will help a worker who wants to compare salaries with a co-worker, against written company policy, and gets punished for it.
The problem usually isn't the unions pushing for fair pay. The problem is all the union rules that interfere with work place efficiency. See for example, dock workers resistance to automation.
Or public unions resistance to basically all forms of accountability
I disagree. You can pass legislation to specifically require pay transparency. Auto workers knew there was a caste system. Older unioned worker made more than new ones. It was sanctified by the union.
So long as everyone gets a Cadillac pension from the government, I could get behind a radically expanded EITC (or just a generous UBI) and no unions, honestly, and I’m quite pro-labor in this world. I get why no one would make the trade off until the benefits are set in stone though
Neither was giving out 175 billion dollars in student loan forgiveness. The only silver lining that I can see from a potential Trump win is Democrats realizing how dumb this kind of old school politics is.
Oh gosh, I am not yet awake. I read your comment about sports teams and thought - huh, that would be interesting to see how fans of different teams align politically. Perhaps it is because I read an article today about people who attempt to complete a Red Line double-header (seeing both a Cubs and a White Sox game on the same day, taking CTA between them). But now that I realize that that is not what you mean, I still think it would be interesting.
1. N=5,500 sample of registered voters nationally with an N=2,750 oversample of 18-29s.
2. No, not just college graduates. Our raw sample did have a lot of college graduates but that’s why we weight things.
3. We used a vendor called Prolific to field the survey then weighted things to ensure a representative sample. Full methodology at bottom of results on youthpoll.yale.edu
Milan, could you say more about the methodology? What does an N=2750 oversample mean? If Prolific sampled 5500 registered voters how was that group comprised of half in the target age range when in the entire population of18-29 year olds comprise around 20%? Did they sample a lot more than 5500 (like around 15,000) to get the 2750 in the 18-29 age range, keep 2750 of those older than 29 and throw out the rest?
Also, as a favor to all the pedants like me out there, it would be great if you didn't show results to three significant figures given the natural uncertainty in poll results.
No we sampled exactly 5,500 RVs. Oversample just means we got extra young people, so we can split them off and get data on what young voters think. For the full electorate sample we use the full N=5,500 and just downweight all the 18-29s so they match their share of the population.
Let me get a little into the weeds to explain. Prolific was our vendor, meaning we used their service to distribute the survey. The survey itself was made using Qualtrics. Way it works is that Prolific sends people from their panel to the Qualtrics survey.
What we did is create one survey form (because we asked everyone the same questions) in Qualtrics. Then Professor Kalla made two different surveys in Prolific — one for Americans of any age range, and another restricted to Americans 18-29. Each of those two was in the field until we got back 2,750 responses a piece.
So if I had to guess, I'd guess that they would first ask the person how old they were, and if older than 29 ask them the rest of the questions until they got 2750 usable respondents but otherwise stop the interview once they had hit the 2750. If the respondent was under 30 they would keep interviewing until they got *that* 2750 sample.
There was a post on Slow Boring a while ago that referenced a political poll that I keep thinking about (but can't relocate, unfortunately) that had like eight political opinions all of which got around 2/3 of Democrats approval. But only 16% or so approved of all of them.
Coalition politics is hard, but you have to be chill on at least some points. The academics and activists, who represent a small section of the Democratic coalition drive too much of the discourse and are very invested in not being chill.
If the polls on non-white voters materialize at the voting booth, there has to be some sort of pre-registration not listen to the Groups or any non-empirical academic pontificators on why and what the response should be.
That would be awesome. I've long thought that was Biden's biggest problem was winning the senate. All of a sudden he thought he was the second coming of FDR and lost his head.
One way of putting this is extremists love polarization. The same reason Hamas and Netanyahu had a twisted, symbiotic relationship up until 10/7. Folks who don't want policy to end up in the middle with compromise try and shrink the middle.
The folks in academia and activism are extremists on racial issues. The last thing they want is for the racial temperature to be turned down. And they are in many ways allies of the Stephen Miller wing of the GOP which also doesn't want the racial temperature turned down.
But turning the temperature down is good for mainstream liberals and good for America.
Hi. I'm in academia. I don't consider myself any kind of extremist on racial issues. I recognize that racism is real and I want everyone to be treated with dignity and respect; I also want the far-left DEI nonsense to go away and stay away.
I’m also in academia and I don’t feel Dilan’s statement included you and me. I definitely think it’s a true statement about many of the institutions I’ve worked for.
Keep this account around for a couple decades at least, a record of statements like this will be quite exculpatory when the purge begins. I would like to see a large quantity of academics shuffling off to the jobs agency.
You've been adjacent to this thesis in other columns, and I couldn't agree more that racial depolarization is a very good thing for America. One of the biggest internal existential threats to the American project could be hard racial polarization, and I think the 2012 - 2016 period was trending in a pretty scary way on that front.
In some ways Biden's win in 2020, while a bit disappointing in terms of how much narrower it was vs what was polled, was hopeful in the way you outline here. He won because he traded some Black/Hispanic vote for white vote and it paid off.
The current driver of polarization today seems to be education, although I've heard (maybe on NYT's Matter of Opinion??) that it's high vs low social trust voters. Compared to hard racial polarization, this feels like something that is more flexible in terms of election to election outcome. If hard racial polarization really set in, well, you can't change your skin color. But I can see how situations can change how high/low education/trust voters polarize between the parties election to election. I think this electoral plasticity will encourage the parties to actually engage with outreach because voters feel gettable again, and might finally kill the nihilistic "lol nothing matters" political attitude that's been hanging around since 2016.
On the other hand, I think the state of the current Republican Party shows some of the serious problems with polarization around social trust. Matt has written about both the crank realignment and the difficulty of getting competent people in Republican governance and both of those seem like serious issues for a country that's divided this way.
I don't think any mode of polarization is without downside! Honestly any mode of polarization, if it becomes super locked in, can lead to political problems. I suppose if I had to choose I'd rather have social trust polarization rather than racial polarization because social trust can change within a person over time while race...not so much.
But agree that it's easy to imagine hard social trust polarization leading to its own bad stuff.
Obviously I want there to be fewer racists, but I also want to move to a world where racists are 50/50 split across both parties (i.e. one party did not make a deliberate strategic decision to court them), just like all the other nutjobs and wierdos, so the non-racists aren't stuck being single-issue voters who only have one party to choose from.
Do you prefer your Hamas regular, with roasted red peppers, or with garlic and dill? I usually have it with some toasted pita and olive tapenade on the side.
The ones in the encampment? Very likely not many democratic votes among them. Maybe in the encampment on the Duke or UNC or Penn campuses, where they understand that they live in a swing state.
Which to be clear is important because if parties feel they have a shot every election you get less zero sum political thinking and hopefully more functional political institutions.
Unfortunately, when both parties feel they have a shot every election you get more not less zero sum thinking.
If you believe you can win next time, the party out of power is incentivized to just block any positive governance that makes the in party look good. Cf McConnell vis a vis Obama, or the Republican House today undrr Biden.
If you think you’re not just a point away from winning next time, you’re incentivized to compromise because you might get a part loaf now, and you know you aren’t just one cycle away from the full loaf.
there have been near countless instances where lack of democracy produced no hope of an electoral avenue, not every instance resulted in terrorism as a response.
I think you get political zero sum thinking when you don't believe you have a chance at winning the next election or that your chronic inability to win majorities forces you to built anti-majoritarian guardrails.
I do worry that along with racial depolarization we’re getting another pernicious type of identity-based polarization: men v women. I thought Richard Reeves’ Politico piece today was a good articulation of how Kamala could be speaking more to men, without alienating women.
The scary thing about Black voters shifting right, from the perspective of the Dem party, is that there could easily be a tipping point dynamic. As Matt pointed out, a lot of Black loyalty for Dems is socially "enforced". Meaning things like, maybe having a Trump yard alienates you from your neighbors in many Black communities and it might suggest bad things about you beyond your politics...you're not really "one of us". (same could be said for a Trump sign on my street, btw, but more for class reasons).
But if it hits a level where, say 30% of young Black voters are with the GOP, that takes away a lot of stigma and opens floodgates. Probably a lot of people who wouldn't have considered even thinking about it begin to, well, think about it.
And then I don't know what Democrats do. Talk about a realignment. My guess is this actually happens in a cycle or two, as in Black voters hit 20%+ for GOP followed by something like a 35% level 4 years later.
I thinking the tipping point is far more likely to be a Trump loss.
Putting a McCain sign, or a Romney sign, was not a point of shame. Lots of people in blue areas did this. Sure, your neighbors might disagree with politics, but no one defaulted to thinking that you were a moron, or a racist.
Trump signs, OTOH, oh boy. I'm not an idiot, I know 45% of people are voting Trump. But I am also pretty damn sure that about half of those 45% are acutely aware that Trump is a moron, a grifter, and a racist. They either do not care, or they think voting Republican is worth holding their nose about it. This is different from legitimately believing that Trump is a capable, (i.e. competent) leader, which will definitely get you shamed in lots of areas.
If Trump loses, and some normie Rpeublicans get nominated, you are going to see a lot more yard signs in 2028, and it won't really be because the politics have radically shifted.
I think it's also scary for Republicans. Right now it doesn't seem that they have to adjust any of their, well, let's call it "white supremacy adjacent" rhetoric (or policies) to carve out parts of the Black electorate. At some point to attract more or retain that growing part of their electorate they may be forced to moderate a lot of their views. That's a very tricky thing! I mean, if you're trying to retain a third of the Black vote, talking about Haitians eating cats may not be the best approach.
"I mean, if you're trying to retain a third of the Black vote, talking about Haitians eating cats may not be the best approach."
Maybe? I strongly suspect that a major "race story" of the next few decades will be about hostility between "ADOS" and black immigrant populations as well potentially hostility between different nationalities of black immigrant populations.
I agree that there are already negative views between ADOS and immigrant black populations -- that was actually the subject of a "Homicide: Life on the Streets" episode back in the 1990s, IIRC -- but it also traditionally involved such microscopic populations (and especially, shares of the electorate) that it was more of a novelty than anything. I'm meaning it will play more of a role in election campaigning, etc.
Two more quick things: Trump said (some) Mexicans were racists and picked up and help a significant amount of Hispanics, including even Mexicans. He barely adjusted his messaging in 2020 or now on these topics.
2nd - just being forced to not talk about eating cats seems much less scary than losing a third of a voting block because of inevitable societal forces. There's lots of ways to adjust for the former, much harder to prevent the latter.
We agree on that, think the question is do Black Americans generally consider Haitian immigrants as part of their block or not? And I feel like the fraction that do may be falling, in the same way that less Hispanics see themselves as "the recent immigrant block"
I'm kind of with srnerson on this. Dissing Haitians probably seems the most racist to older Black Americans. Younger Blacks may be more likely to see it as anti-immigrant. But if they themselves are ant-immigrant maybe it doesn't matter. At least some of the prominent voices of locals complaining in Ohio are local Black people who already lived there.
The good news for Democrats is that JD Vance will likely be the Republican nominee in 2028, whom I highly doubt has any greater pull with the black community than a generic Republican.
For me, personally that assumption is getting to far ahead of ourselves. But I agree that if Trump is the reason black votes are peeling off, then things *could* mean revert.
But a lot of this voting behavior change just seems to be generational. 4 years from now 20% of current senior citizen Black voters, who still vote D at the highest numbers, will have passed and been replaced by younger Black voters who are far more socially assimilated and drawn from much more diverse ethnic and geographic backgrounds. There's really no single "black community" anymore.
I just think people don’t put yard signs out for the socially enforced out party but vote for them anyway if so inclined. I’ve seen a couple of Reichert signs in the neighborhood (the Republican gubernatorial candidate, who is moderate-ish but not by enough), but never a Trump sign. Whereas my mom has been nervous about putting her Harris Walz sign up in Mississippi. No one wants to have their neighbors upset with them or have their house vandalized.
I understand, but the yard signs also enforce the community polarization. According to what I've read here, they actually do have an impact in turnout and persuasion.
So my thesis about Black voter tipping point generalizes to any sort of community. Like I mentioned, so far there's one Trump sign on my street, but as you mentioned, I bet there are more Trump voters. But if every Trump voter on my street put up a sign, more people in my community might not just vote for Trump, but feel OK about organizing, persuading, etc... It's a self-reinforcing cycle.
If real, perhaps the realignment would be good for city government in that blue cities could do with more skepticism about government unions, progressive make-work projects along with a more business-friendly attitude towards zoning and permitting.
Given how poorly these estimates fit together it seems clear people are just bad at estimates.
It would be interesting to know what the mechanism for Democrats doing better with White voters is. Is just a consequence of the parties shifts on social issues?
Are there any instances that people know of where Democrats are making appeals specifically to White voters that might be fueling this shift?
"They also seem to think the Black population is larger than the Hispanic population."
This is due to a combination of (1) Hispanic underrepresentation in popular media (this has been noted for years) and (2) a fairly large percentage of people who identify as "Hispanics" for historical cultural reasons being completely visually indistinguishable from people who identify as "white." (See, e.g., well-known person of color Anya Taylor-Joy.)
Additionally it actually was true not that long ago (year 2000 looks to have been when it swapped), and some of us oldsters may not have updated. When I was born the hispanic population in the US was 1/3 of the black population.
I'm blown away that poll responders could think 29% of the public is Asian when it's 6%, and only a little less surprised that Black was thought of as 41% when reality is 12%.
They didn't ask about multi-racial Americans, but I'd guess that one is underestimated.
On White voters, specifically, it probably is just education, as older, less educated voters pass away and are replaced with a much more educated younger cohort.
I genuinely think this is because of TV casting. When you have four main characters on a show and one of them is inevitably black, it skews people’s perceptions on proportions.
I like this theory but the counter I'd give are Hispanics, since we're also overestimated in surveys but I don't think we are particularly overrepresented on TV.
We've got like, one tough Latina detective on each cop show and Sofia Vergara and that's it.
The most underrepresented group of Americans in movies and TV, bar none, are mestizos. Hollywood would fill all its slots for the Hispanic census category with Pizarro and Cortez themselves if they could.
For Black I was thinking sports, also, and maybe to some degree music. In terms of TV casting, I guess most shows are set in cities, where it would make sense to have more Asian and Black characters?
I've always wondered about this when watching The Great British Bake-Off. In recent seasons about half of the contestants are either non-white or immigrants from other UK countries. Native-born white British people are 76.8% of the UK population (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Kingdom#Ethnicity), but at least in the current season only half the contestants fall in that category. (2023's cohort was more representative.)
That casting in British television (especially BBC productions) at this stage is basically straight-up free recruitment advertising for "Great Replacement Theory" white supremacists has been observed in certain quarters.
Black people have also "punched above their weight" in culture beyond casting, which I think is a good thing. Racial issues also dominate political debates either explicitly or implicitly which has generally been a bad thing. So when you combine the political and cultural aspects, it makes sense why people may overestimate how many black people there are in the US. But it probably mostly comes down to people being hilariously bad at estimates for anything you could ask.
"The answer can be found in a paper<LINK PROVIDED IN ABOVE LINK> by David Landy and colleagues. Based on prior research, these authors hypothesised that we rely on Bayesian reasoning (consciously or otherwise) when we’re asked to estimate a percentage. We begin with a value from our own experience, and then adjust it upwards or downwards toward 50% (the prior probability). If we’re asked about something that seems “common”, we begin above 50% and then adjust downwards. If we’re asked about something that seems “rare”, we begin below 50% and then adjust upwards. For something we have absolutely no clue about, we just stick with 50%. Landy and colleagues refer to the process of adjustment as “uncertainty-based rescaling”. Here’s how they describe it:"
People all over the world are notoriously hopeless at estimating numbers of anything. This is interesting in itself, but I don't think it tells you anything interesting about race particularly. If you asked people to estimate the proportions of people with varying levels of educational attainment you'd probably reach a similarly ridiculous number.
Oh, I know, it's just funny how when you put all the estimates together, it's like "wait..." It would be nice if YouGov, as part of the survey, showed respondents how the numbers they estimated all added up, and gave them a chance to revise, though I suspect they likely didn't.
You need a lot of capacities that a cat doesn’t have in order to use numbers to guess these things.
If you asked people these questions in the same way that you could ask a cat (eg, training them that the snack is inside the cup labeled with the ethnicity of a randomly chosen person and then giving them new cups and seeing how often they choose each) the humans would actually probably be about as good as the cat - maybe better.
To be fair, people tend to overestimate pretty much _any_ small percentage. For a surprising number of people the lowest number they will give an a "what percentage" question is 10%. Root cause a lot of this is just simple innumeracy.
Innumeracy isn't a great word for this. It is a very powerful subconscious bias that you are not immune to even if you are aware of it, and good with math.
White voters are (on average) more pro-abortion than either Black voters (marginally) or Latino voters (significantly). I figure that's a major factor.
The article literally has a poll that shows black and white voters support abortion at the same rate!
The important thing, as Matt points out, is that more white voters support abortion than support Dems as a baseline - so that issue helps increase Dems’ white voter share.
That doesn’t pass the smell test if we’re talking about abortion without restrictions, but I bet those numbers are fairly close for medication abortions.
I am inclined to believe those numbers. The difference between now and 3 years ago is we now have seen what happens when there are restrictions. People might, in the abstract, prefer abortion to be legal up to 18 weeks (arbitrary number), with exceptions for life of the mother and dead fetus. But then they see people dying because doctors refused to treat them, even when there is a life of the mother exception in place. People see women having to carry dead fetuses. And they see 12 year olds having to carry fetuses that were the product of rape. And that changes their opinions really quickly.
Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!
Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!
Stoner metal. I'm a big fan of Clutch. They evolve from DC Hardcore to storytelling stoner metal to a bluesy, Americana-steeped hard rock and back and forth. I recommend the self titled album and Robot Hive/Exodus to start with.
How did that infamous Schumer gaffe go..."for every rural working class voter we lose, we'll gain two suburban professional voters" or something. Now these polls are tilting at, like..."for every voter of colour we lose, we'll gain two white voters". Which, uh, hmm. Perhaps that's simply better pragmatic politics, but it leaves me a little uncomfortable as a non-white. Not like there's no recent history of Asian interests being thrown under the bus for white benefit. Even if it's still the better deal vs. GOP rule, it's hard not to worry about that bargain getting less favourable over time. The whole your-vote-is-taken-for-granite thing...it'd go down easier with some of that less-is-more approach, but I am still waiting for that shoe to drop on the issues I care about, yknow?
Nate Silver lining: if it becomes more widely acknowledged that nonwhites trending rightwards is just How Things Are Now, that lifts some of the chilling effect around being honest with one's sociopolitical views in left company. Perhaps that'll have a bankshot effect of further deflating the Progressive Mobilization Myth and other obscene forms of racial pandering that have been deeply tiring to slog through for the last dozen years. Or even help deflate actual racism, which is so often exacerbated by misunderestimating the differences between groups. Life in retail certainly got easier for me when I stopped being so progressively precious about pious purities...I'd like to think the customers appreciate it on net too. Harder to serve The People if one can't model and fit in with them.
Your silver lining seems more correct. I see what you mean with the first part, but I don’t think it’s a zero-sum game here, and what that would really look like is “for every working-class nonwhite social conservative we lose, we flip two probably-white middle-class suburbanites fed up with the Trump circus.”
The racial zero-sum thinking seems to be applied at a level very separate from electorate analysis and campaign planning. If the Dems were seriously letting the proverbial 21 year old Daily Kos interns to do their actual demographic research and message planning we would be talking about New York flipping red.
I just can't share Matt Y's happy, optimistic "racial depolarization is good, yay!" outlook. Yes, other things being equal, I would certainly take less racial polarization rather than more. But other things aren't equal, and "less racial polarization" is a nice way of saying "a hell of a lot more educational polarization," which Matt barely acknowledges in this piece.
I want Democrats to win, both because I mostly agree with them on issues and because they are led by mostly sane and rational people, not a deranged would-be autocrat and his merry gang of sycophants who would continue to support him wholeheartedly even if he did shoot someone on Fifth Avenue. But unless we water down "college" to the point of meaninglessness, the share of the population that is college-educated will always top out at 30% or so. This is simply not a good way to win elections! What is to be done?
BTW, according to this poll, 8 out of 10 Black people believe that sex between two men is either always or almost always wrong. This is a) depressing as hell and b) further evidence that the progressive worldview of "evil oppressive cishet white people against everyone else, who is therefore united in solidarity" is wrong.
What if it's replaced by economic polarization instead of educational polarization instead? That was the normal politics of 1900 to 1980 or so. I'm not sure it was any better, though.
Yeah a big problem with the progressive worldview is that while it is true that just looking at the racial demographic breakdown by partisan voting pattern the largest group of reactionary conservative voters are white people, the worldview completely collapses in the face of the reality that the largest slice of votes on the left is also white people.
"further evidence that the progressive worldview of 'evil oppressive cishet white people against everyone else, who is therefore united in solidarity" is wrong.'"
No, it just goes to show how deeply Black Americans suffer from internalized racism! [/median progressive]
I made a mistake- it’s 46% of Black people, I.e. almost half, who say gay sex is always or almost always wrong. That’s still depressing! It’s 2024, I thought there was more acceptance of gay sex/ relationships.
I've seen some research that it has actually slid a bit in the last couple of years. Almost certainly because of the overreach and craziness of the trans gender movement.
Not to mention the lack of tolerance for anybody that wasn't 100% on board with their agenda
I mean that stat makes sense coming from the Bible Belt, though there’s of course plenty of gay sex happening on the DL from members of these homophobic churches!
I suspect that there may be less of a moral rationale at work here than meets the eye. There's no shortage of Black Americans, men especially, who believe that the LGBTQIA+ community has benefited more from civil rights measures than we have which is perceived as especially unfair for obvious reasons. I think resentment, in part, may be driving some of those opinions.
OK, but persuade them how? Just trying to help the non-college-educated financially/materially (stronger social safety net, supporting unions) doesn't seem to do it. Kamala has pivoted *hard* to the center (talking about patriotism, an economy of opportunity rather than grievances and zero-sum struggle between the hegemonic whites and oppressed minority groups, tough on crime, talking up immigration reform) and it has done jack squat to shift low-educated voters' opinion of her. They think she's a phony, whereas Trump is a straight talker who "tells it like it is." /facepalm
I don't think it can be done within a single election cycle, let alone two and a half weeks. But it starts with setting the goal, continuing to publicize which aspects of substantively good policy are good for noncollege workers, and recruiting more noncollege workers to run for office within the Party.
Oh, one obvious reason I forgot to mention that Hispanic voters in particular are moving right: they're less likely to have relatives who are here illegally. Democrats overestimated how much immigrants voters care about immigration, but it is true that many immigrants want their family to come here, and if they do have a family member here illegally, they don't want that family member deported. But as soon as everybody in your family is here legally, your views on immigration revert to the mean. The recent arrivals from Venezuela don't all have family here, so somebody who is Hispanic who is born here and both of their parents are legal immigrants isn't going to have views on immigration much different than the average White (or Black for that matter) American's views.
There's also some level of resentment from Mexican-American communities that have been here for generations toward the latest arrivals from other (Central and South American) countries, partially due to not wanting to be lumped in with them as a demographic group.
As a Southern Black progressive, I welcome the coming racial realignment! The Blacks = Dems sentiment is essentially a response to fear of Republicans, but even if correct a fear-based coalition can't do much.
That said, I would like to see these types of polling results broken out by region. Most African Americans have a Southern heritage, but I would guess those of us still in the South are both somewhat more conservative overall and less distinctively conservative relative to our white neighbors.
Hopefully the racial realignment will make southern Republicans stop their undemocratic focus on racially gerrymandering too. I imagine we're still a decade or two from having that come to fruition, but it's something to hope for.
It my lifetime I have only witnessed Republicans become more morally debased and absurd. It would take a lot for them to move away from their current trajectory. Trump might not be a climax but a stepping stone to levels of moral corruption and delusion currently unfathomable.
That's probably a better bet!
On election night, watch Merriwether County, GA. It’s small and counts quickly. It’s also roughly half white and half black and half rural whites. I seriously doubt Harris gets over 15% of the white vote there. It’s also highly segregated, the eastern precincts are lilly white, greenville is almost entirely black. You’ll be able to get data on racial voting patterns fairly early if you look at jt.
I think it could make it worse. Racial gerrymandering at least gave Republicans an out to say that they were accommodating more minority representation in legislatures. But if that's not necessary anymore, alongside the terrible Rucho v. Common Cause SCOTUS case, we could see them go full on with the most salient urban/rural divide, and gerrymander more cities than Nashville or Salt Lake City to oblivion.
That's a little tougher because of how many people live in the suburbs of the bigger cities.
I wouldn't doubt the ability. I live in the most gerrymandered state in the US, North Carolina. When the designer of one of the maps some time back was asked why in a state that was only slightly R leaning, they had a map that would give 11 of 13 seats to the Rs, his answer was that he couldnt find a way to get 12.
As City of Trees note the killer was Rucho which constitutionalized partisan gerrymandering by a 5-4 vote along partisan lines, and that wont be overturned with this court. I wont claim that it was unjustified, Constitutional law is above my pay grade, and it might be that the Constitution doesn't forbid partisan gerrymandering, but common decency does.
And we know that Republicans have embraced indecency as one of their core attributes.
Is it really racial gerrymandering? Or just partisan gerrymandering?
Historically they have looked very similar, but in the future maybe less so
The goals are certainly partisan and it is just that the Black vote is so high percentage Dem that any partisan gerrymander will likely look racial The courts have become more reluctant on calling the racial out, but I hardly care as partisan gerrymandering is just wrong.
Is there also a tendency for better-educated (and therefore statistically more liberal) Southern Black folks to move out of the South? (Southern Whites definitely do this, a substantial chunk of my law school class (in the Northeast) was White Southerners who said they came here because they were too liberal for Alabama/Texas/South Carolina/etc. The Democratic Law Students was run by Southern students for a few years. And of the ones I knew only one went back to the South after graduation.)
This was true up through the 60s, but now the trend is going the other way, called reverse great migration where Northern blacks are moving South to places like Atlanta, Charlotte, Raleigh, less so the deep South, to escape the crime and high cost of living in the North. This accounts for some of the trend in Georgia in particular toward Democrats.
The other trend is that college grads are increasingly moving to some of the high tech areas in the South like Research Triangle, NC and Atlanta.
The percentage of Blacks living in the South reached a low point in 1970 but has risen in all the decades since.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Great_Migration
How does the old or new great migration interact with education level?
Atlanta isn’t Deep South?
I indicated South not Deep South and if you follow the Wiki link in the aggregate the entire South is seeing a gain though not so much in the Deep South ie MS, AL, AR and more GA, NC, TX, FL.
Kenny I suspect that the cohort returning is higher education though I dont know if I have data on that. The states mentioned TX, NC, GA have strong tech and research job growth.
>Is there also a tendency for better-educated (and therefore statistically more liberal) Southern Black folks to move out of the South?<
Undoubtedly such a tendency exists, in that higher-educated (and therefore higher-earning) Americans move across state lines more frequently than less well-educated Americans. Black Americans are not an exception, and obviously a nonzero percentage of Southern Black professionals who move across state lines move out of the region. I'm not sure the number is large, though, and it would also have to be balanced against Black professionals who depart other regions *for* the South. Metros like Atlanta, Orlando, Charlotte, Nashville etc are pretty big magnets for American professionals of all backgrounds, and I'd personally be surprised if the South were losing college-educated Black people on net.
Ernest I don't know if the impetus was fear as much as loyalty to FDR, JFK, LBJ as the Dems with the exception of the Dixiecrats were bigger on civil rights as the GOP courted the white Southern vote. And then the Southern Dems switched to the GOP like Helms and Thurmond.
Matt's post pairs well with yesterday's loooooong NYTimes article about DEI at the University of Michigan. It seems the more Progressive wing of the coalition doesn't understand black people any more than Republicans do.
An unpaywalled link for those who might not subscribe to the NYTimes: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/16/magazine/dei-university-michigan.html?unlocked_article_code=1.S04.GEE-.J763ek8ijlBq&smid=url-share
I finally read it.
Man, it’s really over for these guys. That article is an intentional clarion call from the NYT. They hit everything:
- I’ll start with the best: openly laying out with plenty of evidence that university administrations are attempting massive resistance against anti-affirmative action rulings. They print among many other things a direct confession: “One of the misconceptions about Prop 2 is that it inhibited our faculty searches by not allowing us to search based on race and gender or offer financial aid based on race and gender,” [National-level DEI product-seller] said at a Michigan D.E.I. event last year. “We just had to pivot to be more creative.”
- Demonstrating that the policies are widely disliked by a “silent majority.” I really can’t think of a more succinctly descriptive term for what it is.
- Using terminology like “DEI bureaucracy,” “distinctive jargon,” and absolutely knowing what they were doing when they included: “The Black Law Students Association issued further demands, including mandatory antiracism training, more mental health counseling and the hiring of a professor in critical race theory.”
- Citing critical sources throughout, and distinctively not taking university figures at face value. There’s no sense of a “blue wall of silence” here from one big, uh, blue-coded institution to another.
- A subsequent section that consists mostly of examples of absolute nonsense from 2020 and thereabouts.
- A conclusion largely about the October 7th-aftermath protest grotesqueries on campus.
I’m not sure how much more of an official stamp you can get on the idea that DEI can be criticized again. I predict that plenty of people in that industry should start polishing their resumes, as the trend shifting distinctly to “out” will dry up any investment in that sector.
This is to say nothing of how relieving it is to be seeing this bullshit finally run its course.
“We just had to pivot to be more creative.”
It's crazy to compare this to the way businesses are screened and tested for bias or discrimination. Nearly all the focus is on unintentional discrimination, because few people believe that for-profit businesses intentionally discriminate as a goal in-and-of-itself. So people look for things like correlations, ie, you offer different prices or services to your lowest income customers, your lowest income customers are probably less White, ergo, racism.
But in Academia they really are just intentionally, flat-out, going for discrimination.
Hence why Americans hate it. Explicit unfairness codified in practice is offensive.
The $64,000 question is whether the Supreme Court has the stomach to fight it for 20 years. Massive resistance can be very effective unless the Court is really willing to take lots of cases and get into the details.
Don't really see "massive resistance" despite what you may hear from the usual blowhards. Harvard has taken seriously the need to retreat from overly agressive DEI and to push back against demands to take progressive political stands on everything. Over the summer I noticed they had taken to keeping most gates locked in order to prevent encampments on the part of protesters. Many colleges are fighting for financial survival in the post-Covid era and beginning to understand they do not have the luxury of using campuses to fight culture wars.
That is a different issue from hiring committees trying to diversify their academic disciplines, which is definitely how a lot of people on the committees want to think.
Damn New York Times, constantly peddling right-wing conspiracy nonsense.
To fight what? Illegal affirmative action in higher-ed? Doesn't the Supreme Court just take lawsuits that are brought to them? Maybe I just have no idea how SCOTUS works.
The Court decides what cases to take. No one is entitled to have their case heard by the Supreme Court.* It takes the votes of 4 justices for the Court to take up a case.
*There are very narrow exceptions, I think including disputes between states and cases involving certain diplomat-type folks.
"because few people believe that for-profit businesses intentionally discriminate as a goal in-and-of-itself"
Sure, but lots of people believe that PEOPLE do this. A for-profit business needs to not only control for unconscious bias, but also for bad actors who act in their own personal self-interest instead of in the firm's best interest.
In lots of places, you can easily throw a tennis ball and have it land on some company that hires sub-optimal talent because the people in that company discriminate quite intentionally. As an example, my wife recently interviewed for a job where they flat out said that they want to hire a woman (and no, there was absolutely nothing about this job where any reasonable person could conclude that gender was relevant to success).
Sure - my head is in the rules-based, algorithmic or automatic decision making space because that's what I work with.
There may be individual people at any place who are subjectively putting their thumbs on the scales, and there must be a lot of subjectivity in college admissions. But they also have large doses or rules and procedures and scoring in their design, and that's what I was primarily thinking of.
I went back to school in 2018 and got to experience peak DEI. It was miserable. You’d think from the DEI presentations that every white person is a fucking moron who never saw or thought about a minority in their lives. You couldn’t skip all of them either—you needed to get some number of “diversity credits” to stay in good standing. And while I don’t know that anyone would have gotten in trouble for speaking out per se, the environment was far too coercive for serious discussion of the harm of DEI. It was something that even liberal students found insufferable and one of the main wedges that lured me into Republican politics before I came to my senses later (which, I’m sure not coincidentally, happened alongside a decline in the popularity and clout of DEI).
I may be extrapolating too much from my own experiences, but I think a lot of people seriously underestimate how harmful a lot of DEI initiatives are in trying to build winning coalitions and bring talented, hard-working people of all stripes into liberal politics. A LOT of the presentations went soaring over the line from “informing about previous acts of oppression” into straight up anti-white racism. More than once I wondered how utterly cancelled and fired these people would be if they said the same things about black people. And while a smarmy millennial ignorantly lecturing you about misbehavior she assumes of you because you’re white is certainly small potatoes compared to the historical injustices of slavery and the civil rights era, it’s still an unwarranted attack on your basic dignity as a person that drives people into the arms of the first opportunist to capitalize. These same people breathlessly wonder how orange idiot man could be so appealing…
About ten years ago I went through a graduate program that included a mandatory social justice class. The class was a mixture of principal certificate-seeking educators, nursing students, and social justice majors(!).
The latter group created such a refrain of “of course a white/cis/straight person would say that” - I think specifically of a time they were mad about a reading of how Bobby Kennedy helped Caesar Chavez - that by the end of the course there was a clear us/them divide that educators & nurses would kid on the square that the class has succeeded in making us all more conservative.
The biggest qualm I have with anti-racist framings is that they categorize some people as inherently good and other people as inherently bad based off of visual and immutable characteristics. What further compounds the anti-rational framework is that there is nothing those assigned the pejorative label can do to absolve themselves or leave their assigned group. The whole framework does not care about individual actions, agency, or intention.
Kendi's one good idea is actually that we should stop labeling people as "racist" or not, and worry more about what actions are racist. Unfortunately he then goes on to try to redefine "racist" in an expansive and unhelpful way and some other shit, but that first idea is kind of the opposite of what you're saying (and what many progressives seem to practice)!
yep so basically anti-racism is just straight up racism, but just against white people, and now often Jews.
Well of course! Jews are the crystallized core of whiteness, donchaknow: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/ajs-review/article/white-jews-an-intersectional-approach/B3A8D66A0B6895A61814047FE406A2A6
Didn't disagree with much substantially in your post.
But I'll just note that its the people who have been subjected to the most obnoxious DEI initiatives (whether at universities or in white collar professions) are the people have moved increasingly in the Democratic column.
I may be speaking only for myself, but I sort of find the DEI discussion very closely correlated to crime discussion (sometimes for ugly reasons which I'll get to). So in 2020 and 2021 there became a big uptick in stories about rising crime. And thing is, crime really did rise. And unfortunately too many far lefties denied this rise which had the perverse effect of pushing people right in the 2022 midterms (at least in NY). Also had the perverse effect of helping turn people away from what I still think are worthwhile initiatives like bail reform; think the "evidence" that bail reform caused the crime spike to be extremely wanting, but if the same people shouting loudest for bail reform are also denying crime was rising at all, can see how that could lead voters to conclude bail reform is a problem. So yeah, if you live in a super lefty area where lots of people talk a big game about "defund the police", can see how that can leave a real sour taste in your mouth. But then I turn on my tv and I see the mayor of New York say crime has never been worse in his life; an absurd statement for someone who as a cop in the late 80s. I see on Fox News stories that imply or outright say that cities are "escape from New York" hell holes. And then I see Tom Cotton using these stories to advocate for a truly authoritarian anti-crime agenda and I say to myself "you know what. As much as too many lefties got over their skies in 2020 and 2021, it pales in comparison to the ugly ideas coming from the other side. And oh yeah, the far lefty "defund the police" types have way less power than the orange man leader who has a real shot of becoming president again.
Think the DEI stuff is sort of same bucket. You have this nauseating initiatives on college campuses and some offices around the country. But then you have scare stories about how DEI is taking over America. And now you have a presidential candidate calling Kamal Harris a "DEI hire" https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/team-trump-calls-kamala-harris-dei-hire-rcna164117....clearly using DEI as this catch all pejorative and clearly aping Lee Atwater's famous observation to the Atlantic back in the 80s. Which again puts me in the position of saying "as annoying as DEI is, the right is making this out to be this all powerful boogeyman so out of proportion to it's actual real world impact".
I should also note the these DEI fights on campuses is a prime example of Sayre's law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre%27s_law#:~:text=Shapiro%2C%20editor%20of%20The%20Yale,the%20thought%20behind%20Sayre's%20law.
I hadn’t ever heard of Sayre’s law until now, but I came up with it on my own in grad school! Ha
I went to a single DEI program in November of last year, which promised to explain the simple and morally clear history of (checks notes) the war in Gaza, in terms of European imperialism and colonialism that exploited the poor little European Jews and harmed the poor little Arab Jews.
Yes. Really. It actually happened. The lecture was given by a guy from the History department who studied Ottoman history and, frankly, did not know how to deal with any facts that didn't fit his frame of bad Europeans coming and oppressing good Arabs.
That would be an extremely...unusual position for someone who was a professor of Ottoman history, which very much does not fit that frame, in any way, unless he'd decided the Ottoman's themselves were 'European' which is a complicated and pretty useless question?
He was basically treating the Ottomans as sort of "Arab-coded".
Now I'm really curious about an Ottoman historian who views history as 'bad Europeans coming and oppressing good Arabs.' Any details?
I only saw him for that one lecture, but basically he was doing the Edward Said-type of apologia.
Whoa, diversity credits?!?
The way the headline figures in that article are being cited seems a bit problematic. Apparently they spent $250m over 8-9 years. Call it $30m a year. The university's budget is apparently $13b a year. So they spent ~0.2-0.25% of their budget on DEI. Organisations waste larger shares of their resources all the time.
While I was looking up their budget, Wiki told me UMichigan employs 2.9 administrative staff for every academic staff member. I don't know anything about running a university but I don't recall ever seeing an organisation that's even close to 3 support staff for every front-line employee. So potentially the resource allocation problem goes way beyond any particular issues with how the DEI budget is operated.
How to cut administrative bloat >> https://www.progressivepolicy.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/PPI_College_Admin_Bloat.pdf
I say we throw them all in the Thunderdome
Two career counselors enter; one career counselor leaves?
After reading the article, I think the reach of their DEI initiatives seems pretty extensive, regardless of its % of spending.
In any event, the more surprising thing to me was the doubling-down onto DEI 2.0 in the face of evidence of failure.
The article and the statistics noted above just bring me back to a point Matt has made repeatedly about too many Democrat initiatives regarding public services and the economy in general; should your policies be about creating jobs over and above anything else. From 2008 to probably around 2017-2018 this made sense (if I'm not mistaken layoffs from state and local governments was a pretty big part of the reason labor market still had a lot of slack circa 2011-2015). To narrow down to local government, Matt has made a pretty persuasive case to me that if people (like me) want to convince the public at large that higher taxes for public services is a good tradeoff than we have actually have to prioritize the services aspect of government over the making jobs aspect.
What does this have to do with Michigan and DEI. I think we need to see explosion of administrative functions in colleges and DEI jobs at least in part as a jobs program for liberal arts majors. The reality is, colleges are probably producing too many liberal arts degrees (and I say this as someone who has a History degree and personally laments the decline of the History major). And unless you want to complete reorient your career trajectory like I did, you need to find some way to use what's ultimately not a degree that has much demand in the private sector. Think this is dynamic is directly tied to number of DEI jobs and administrative jobs exploding.
Believe it or not I think this is related to my posts about Affirmative Action. There is a tension between the institutions that colleges were in a pre-modern economy (finishing schools for the rich) and what they are now (increasingly necessary training centers for modern world). With the affirmative action example, there is tension between an elite college's supposed commitment to progressive values and the fact it's still in too many ways still just a finishing school for the rich (hence legacy admission still existing and hence why places like Harvard don't double their number of students which would actually be a commitment to progressive values). In the DEI example, in much the same way that needing to know Latin and Greek is no longer a major part of college experience, I think there needs to be a rethink as to how many of these liberal arts degree programs are actually worthwhile and needed (and I say this as someone who thinks something like Gender studies is way more valuable than learning Greek or Latin).
As someone who teaches at a liberal arts college, I think there is big misconception about what liberal arts colleges actually do: a majority of students are science majors -- bio, chem, physics, bio-chem, psychological science -- social science majors, business majors and comp-sci majors. Liberal arts schools require more courses in general education (a broad range of disciplines) but not that much more than a traditional R1 institution. In fact, R1 institutions also have general education requirements that largely mirror the general education requirements at liberal arts college. So, to recap, liberals arts colleges aren't only Humanities-based colleges. At my college, the number of gender studies majors is miniscule, which is how it should be, in my opinion. I teach film in the English department and we have small numbers, as it should be. There is too much elite overproduction.
And there has been a significant increase in administration hires at our college since 1994, when the faculty salary pool matched the administrative salary pool. Currently, the admin salary pool is three times as large as the faculty pool.
I think DEI at my college is very expensive and not at all effective or productive. It would have been better if we simply gave all the money for consultants, administrators, and workshop leaders to poor people. College is too late to address economic disparity -- we need better economic solutions to poverty that address issues at the root level, even before the student is born, like building generational wealth, etc.
I liked and agree with the broader points of this comment, but I disagree about gender studies v classics. Call me ridiculous (or just old), but reading Virgil in Latin was a mind-blowing experience for me (as an undergrad at Michigan).
I'm working on a research project at UM now, and while there is certainly a lot of admin/different framing to what I experienced in the previous millennium, I'm not sure it's worse than in other places, including other places I've worked (such as the NYC government).
yep, I think gender studies has on balance been probably a negative for the world.
I think there’s probably an argument to be had about Gender Studies circa 2005 vs 2024. I know for sure the discipline has undergone massive changes in focus and curricula, and I’m not sure (ha) it’s been for the better on balance.
What a great comment.
“and I say this as someone who thinks something like Gender studies is way more valuable than learning Greek or Latin”
Why, if you study the classics you might realize why trying to revive the cult of Cybele is probably a bad decision?
TIL
My big take away is that DEI created a bunch of unfunded program and paperwork mandates that are orthogonal to people whose jobs should be research and teaching.
Well, at the U of M, DEI is clearly a funded mandate, which is the problem. But normally, I agree with you that DEI is largely an unfunded mandate, which is bad, but not much better than a funded mandate that isn't proven to be effective. And, in fact, DEI has been largely proven to be counter-productive.
Well there’s both. There’s the unfunded mandate on the academic departments, enforced by a funded bureaucracy.
It is a general principle I see in government, evidence of failure of a policy is often seen as an argument for more funding.
While I overall agree that DEI is a big waste of everything, I think Binya's point is well-taken. Certainly the gigantic ballooning of university administrations started long before DEI was around.
I think these are separate issues. People's complaints with DEI programs aren't solely (or even primarily) about the overall cost, so highlighting their low proportional cost doesn't really address the arguments against them.
I think the ballooning of admin budgets at universities (coupled with people's concerns about the parallel ballooning of cost for students) is an absolutely legitimate issue that needs to be addressed. But that's separate from the DEI issue, and not really related in a meaningful way IMHO.
The article chose to highlight the cost of the department, and do so in a way that made it seem like an objectively large number (highlighting the per-decade cost not the per-year cost).
As I stated in my responses to Binya, I don't think that the highlighting of the total cost was inaccurate or irrelevant or misleading. The amount can be both a) a large amount of money, and b) a small amount of their overall budget- there's nothing inconsistent or misleading about that.
If the federal government was wasting $10 billion on a program that is hugely unpopular and doesn't seem to be achieving any of its goals (quite the opposite), I think that responding to criticisms of the amount by saying that it's just a tiny portion of the overall federal budget wouldn't really address in any way the complaint that people were lodging. And if someone said "this wasteful program has cost $10 billion!!" most people would understand that to be a lot of wasted money, regardless of how much money the government spends in total.
I think the argument you're making goes the other way. Given the myriad harms listed in the article, as well as discussed elsewhere (including on this substack over the years), not to mention the ways in which Republicans have been able to weaponize DEI as a real political cudgel, the low level of funding seems to be causing wildly disproportionate harms. It's like saying "sure, this heroin I'm ingesting is less than 1% of my overall caloric intake each day, so therefore it's not a very big deal to my health."
I feel I didn't comment on DEI either way, and I was making a narrow comment on the way a figure was being cited. Relaxing one's epistemological standards when arguing for positions one agrees with is bad.
And I think that presenting the cost as the total spend is a fair way to present the figure given the failure of the programs to achieve their goals, as well as the ways in which the programs have caused significant harms. It's not they're neutrally wasteful- they're actively harmful.
I don't think it's a fair rebuttal to say "this program that costs tens of millions of dollars annually is only a tiny amount of the overall budget so therefore saying it's a lot of money is not accurate." But if you do want to do that, I think comparing it to the overall budget is equally unfair. Compare it to the budgets of the areas in which it's being implemented to get a good sense of how much it's impacting the particular programs that the funds could otherwise be allocated to.
By way of example- I work for a large municipal executive agency, and it's budget time right now. We have to make cuts due to the fiscal environment facing just about every municipal government in the country. I can promise you that we're not looking at programs that amount to less than 1% of the overall municipal budget and shrugging our shoulders. Heck, we're not looking at programs that are 1% of our own AGENCY budget and shrugging our shoulders. There are lots of things that are tiny parts of our overall budget that are hugely expensive and incredibly relevant to examine for efficiency's sake and to try and make sure we can provide necessary services with the money we actually have available. So dismissing the statement that these are incredibly costly programs by saying "not relative to EVERYTHING UM spends money on" doesn't strike me as a good way to think about the financial costs, let alone the social costs.
I truly wasn't trying to advocate for shrugging shoulders. I stand by my view that a 0.25% of budget line item is, by the laws of arithmetic, far from unusual, and this reality is being somewhat misrepresented as taking the unusual step of quoting it over a 8-9 year period.
If the spending is harmful, it doesn't matter if it's big or small, it should stop. Sensible people don't allocate resources to activities that cause harm. But that's a separate question.
"If the spending is harmful, it doesn't matter if it's big or small, it should stop. Sensible people don't allocate resources to activities that cause harm. But that's a separate question."
Just to be clear then, the objection is to the description of $250 million over 10 years as being a "staggering" amount of money to allocate for these purposes?
Again, going through budgetary reviews now, and I can tell you that we view 0.25% of our budget as both a small proportion of our overall budget AND an incredibly large amount of actual money, so I would disagree with you on your point, but I want to make sure I'm correctly interpreting it here. There are lots of things that make up 0.25% of an enormous budget, but if the budget is enormous enough then describing things that cost 0.25% of it a staggering amount can still be fair IMHO.
As a faculty member at a research university who's worked at multiple R1 universities over the past 14 years, I would caution that you need to dig into the numbers a bit more for context. Again according to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Michigan#Finances), Michigan gets 3% of its budget from the State, and another 11% from tuition and fees. Of the remaining 86%, 10.4% is research funding, most of which goes to paying research staff, grad students, and postdocs who I'm guessing are mostly not classified as academic staff. 58.2% of the budget is auxiliary funds, the vast majority of which are either Michigan Medicine or athletics, both of which are primarily self-funding.
So a huge chunk of those administrative staff aren't leeching off the funding that should be in the classroom - they are fulfilling the research and/or patient care enterprises.
Setting those aside, you also have to consider the enormous growth in the IT needed to successfully run a university. The course management system, the registration systems, classroom instructional design, negotiating and managing and support for licensed software and databases, the university's websites. You need people outside the classroom to run those things. If you fired all the IT department your administrative/academic staff ratio would decline, but I guarantee both students and faculty would miss them.
We could lay off all the development staff but then there wouldn't be anyone to raise money from alumni for student scholarships.
I could keep going...
At a university, the administrative staff doesn’t just support front-line employees. They support the students. Many of them are frontline for non-teaching purposes.
I have been thinking about that...I guess US universities also provide students with housing, healthcare, food, police...so it's probably hard to compare with a more typical organisation which provides a more standalone service.
Yes but that was true 4 decades ago too. So why the dramatic increase in non academic positions?
This may be neither here nor there, but, in the past, I think a lot of tasks that are currently handled by administrators were handled by teachers/professors. I'm thinking about counseling (both career and personal counseling), policy-making for the university, dorm supervision (maybe still being done by faculty members?).
It's interesting because opinions among professors vary on this. My wife used to work as an academic advisor at Marquette University in Milwaukee and I would say the majority of professors she worked with were pleased that they weren't advising students on course selection, credit load, etc. This tended to be the case with professors in STEM fields. The humanities professors were still mostly pro-advisor but a larger share of them wanted to still handle advising. This could be a unique to Marquette thing so I don't intend to draw any broad conclusions, but it was interesting.
The only other point I'll make about administrative bloat is that some of these positions do provide services that students appreciate, expect, and utilize. Tutoring and supplemental instruction programs come to mind. This is not to say that all of these programs are sacrosanct it's more akin to Matt's point about media flaws largely being the fault of audience expectations. A lot of families and prospective college students are expecting these services and that makes this a harder discussion.
They figured out one weird trick to constantly vote themselves more jobs. It’s not some response to a need, it’s just institutional capture. They’ll invent a need, hire people to fill it, and then gain a larger constituency. Rinse, repeat.
I would probably calculate it as two proportions, of the “student services” bucket and of the “admin” bucket.
It’s probably a more obscene percentage of the former. When people talk about stupid progbrain admin it’s usually a cultural thing, the fact that there are simply too many administrative personnel seems to be a pretty universal and non-partisan observation at a lot of corporations and even universities now.
Plus, spending isn't the right way to think about an initiative like this. It doesn't cost anything to tell all your existing staff to "do this DEI thing". The focus of the article is the ubiquity of how DEI has worked into all aspects of the University. The spending is just on the training and minimizes the extent of the work.
The average cost for an in-state UM undergraduate is about $35k-40k. There are currently 33k undergraduates attending UM. So that $30 million each year could go towards paying the entirety of the tuitions of the ~750 poorest in-state students or half the tuition of the ~1,500 poorest in-state students. Or take ~$900 off every undergraduate's tuition or just give every undergraduate ~$900 to just spend however they want. All those options seem like better uses of that $30 million per year than spending it on DEI bureaucracy.
>I don't know anything about running a university but I don't recall ever seeing an organisation that's even close to 3 support staff for every front-line employee.<
These days that's the rule, not the exception, in US universities, I'm pretty sure.
When I first encountered DEI when applying for academic jobs back in the U.S., I saw it as a transparent rent seeking and consultancy effort. It was not aimed at ameliorating material problems. What I find interesting in the NYT piece (so far, halfway through) is how the omnicause has contributed to the DEI backlash.
One thing that bothers me about all the DEI statements and initiatives are all the wasted hours candidates put in when they were never going to be considered for immutable factors and when the reports didn’t matter to those in charge.
The omnicausers with bullhorns and slogans and DEI bureaucrats are frequently the same people.
Right, that's what the NYT article actually showed: a bunch of the time, when some undergrads mobilized to make "demands" of university administrators, they were being coached, encouraged, and materially supported by other branches of the university administration. It was bureaucrat-on-bureaucrat warfare.
I currently work in a DOD research lab within a university system and we had to do the standard university new-hire training that professors and administrators all had to do. We had to do all the standard diversity and anti-discrimination training which, even though it was mostly common sense, was perfectly reasonable and not too long. It was the standard stuff about understanding that people come from different background and hold different views and customs and it's important to respect that and that you do your part to help create an inclusive and welcoming environment.
But after that, tacked onto the end of the new-hire training was the "DEI" training. Did it actually cover anything practical that the previous training mentioned above didn't? No, but it was much more aggressive and confrontational than the other training and used all the popular DEI buzzwords like "microaggressions", "antiracism", and "white supremacy" mixed into various word salads. It didn't change my views on anything in any way. It did waste a couple hours of my day (~$100-200 of taxpayer money) that could have been better spent actually learning how to do my job, although I'm sure it made lots of money for the people who made the glossy presentations and videos.
“ Gilbert reported the dispute with Lyons to administrators, but was unhappy with how the school handled her concerns. After Floyd’s killing, she decided to detail her experiences on Twitter.”
The weaponizing of offense and using DEIwashing to justify lying and lashing out at an English professor is saddening.
This wasn't just acedemia. My firm had a large DEI department in 2020, and it no longer exists today (this isn't to say all DEI initiatives are gone, some of them are just part of regular HR now). I am sure a lot of other folks have similar stories.
DEI is important for organizations, in a "table stakes" way. Hiring whole teams for it seems a bit nuts, though, in the way that if you hired a whole team and made them responsible for "Honesty and Transparency" or such. I think if you worked at any firm that had an "Honesty and Transparency" department, you'd probably be inclined to think a couple of things:
- people who work here are not very honest, and probably do not communicate transparently, and that seems kind of like a red flag
- people who work here probably dislike the Honesty and Transparency department people
- I kind of doubt the people in the Honestly and Transparency department are experts in honesty or transparency.
Isn’t “honesty and transparency” supposed to be “internal audit” anyway?
Skimmed the article, and I could already tell that things were going bad there at the beginning of it when I saw they were using Tema Okun's bad material. Also, I'm eagerly awaiting to see if diversity statements at public institutions get struck down as a First Amendment violation.
But overall, I really think that people that are hyperobsessive about this might have won some battles in the beginning, but will lose the war because they'll be seen by others as being real assholes for pushing these tensions, and end up as people that no one wants to be around or to hire.
When the intention of said statement are to compel speech that conforms with a narrow set of normative political beliefs, then they are plausibly a first amendment violation.
I wonder if schools that use these documents as an affirmative action proxy are going to “lose” all these documents from applications after they get sued?
> but will lose the war because they'll be seen by others as being real assholes for pushing these tensions, and end up as people that no one wants to be around or to hire.
Which is too bad as we probably need these people vocally and publicly pushing back to make progress. And I say this as a "head-in-the-sand" sort of academic who just plays along to the degree my conscience allows.
It's all just a huge distraction. Our system has nothing to do with training for marketable skills --> career growth --> financial security --> fulfilling life and everything to do with complaining about the rules, and jobs for rules oversight.
It would be like if a UK soccer academy took focus off of physical soccer development in place of finding a bunch of sensitive theatre kids that hate soccer to become bureaucratic team and league officials to constantly scrutinize any actual playing of soccer, declare everything unfair, and lobby for change.
The priority needs to be on human development for success in the marketplace. I agree fully that progressives have no clue about black people. They think everyone is Noah Tanenbaum from the Sopranos.
From the article:
“Michigan has poured roughly a quarter of a billion dollars into D.E.I. since 2016…”
Pretty astonishing.
“‘D.E.I. here is absolutely well intentioned, extremely thoughtful in its conception and design…But it’s so virtuous that it’s escaped accountability in a lot of ways.’”
Well, if it’s virtuous..
I’m saving that article for Friday
As a Latin American, the way some people talk about us as if we were a single block with single set of beliefs has always struck me as, at best, excessively reductive.
The people surprised at the conservative beliefs of Hispanics clearly don't have much exposure to the communities that make it up.
Hola, amigxs! I can’t wait to learn Spanish so I can travel to Rio de HHHHHHaneirow!
I've just been to Spain for a couple of weeks and been surrounded by people who speak Spanish and whose skin colour would probably count as "brown" to most white Americans - at least, they do in late September/early October, when the summer tans are at their height - but who are also inarguably "white". It really does rub home how utterly unrelated to reality the American racial categories actually are. Not to say that other countries' racial categories are any more related to reality!
Most white people do manage to notice that white people aren't a single block with a single set of beliefs, and it would be nice if they'd realise that the same applies to all the other races too.
I guess it would be nice if White people noticed it more, just like it would be nice if Americans of all census categories noticed this more, but it's not like this categorization has been imposed on Hispanics by outsiders. Many of the politicians and organizers who decided to create Hispanic as a census category were Hispanic. Just like many Hispanic politicians continue to make the decision to organize politics around the Hispanic category.
It was a choice made to benefit Hispanics by raising numbers at a time when numbers were lower, and made at a time (I'm thinking 60s-80s) where it was thought that most Mexican-Americans and Puerto Ricans and others really did share enough commonalities that it made sense.
I'm pretty sure the story behind 'Hispanic' as a Census category was that the Feds got literally 6 or 8 people in a room and that's what they came out with. I can't remember where I read that so grain of salt, but it wasn't like there was a big public consensus about it.
I mean, you're correct on the one hand that it wasn't "a big public consensus," but there were absolutely Hispanic political activists who were pushing for the category to be created: https://www.latinousa.org/2014/05/02/invention-hispanics/
There's definitely some amount of tacit acceptance that continues though. For everybody who is personally annoyed by it, there may be another that thinks "if I was counted as Peruvian-American I'd barely be noticed".
Also - I'm typically touting the fact that assimilation, diversity and racial depolarization are accelerating, but there are still communities where mergers of Hispanic ethnicities is a thing. When I was back in Reading, PA, recently, there lots of stores geared towards Latinos and Spanish-language speakers. Most of those places aren't trying to appeal to smaller niches. I'm sure you can find "Mexican music night" at various clubs and bars, but more ethnically generic versions are much more common.
Sure. Now in Miami, LA, NYC it’s very different, though. Coming from Memphis where all the “Hispanic” people were from Mexico and northern Central America, when I moved to Miami I was impressed by the whole diversity that comprises the label. no one would have just identified as Hispanic or Latino but their actual former nationality, and there was a plethora of great food from specific places in Latin America.
You're still talking about us as if we're a single entity.
It was a decision by *some* Hispanics who stood to benefit from it. But it's not a label that we all accept or identify with. For many of us it was imposed on.
I apologize, but my excuse is it's almost impossible to expediently talk about political trends without using clunky labels. If we say "democrats did X" it never means all Democrats did it or agreed with it.
My point to Richard was that it wasn't a bunch of White people that imposed this label from on high. Many of the people that created this label, if not most of them, were people who fit the "Hispanic" category. I'm not sure what level of support it may have had among average people at the time, but my guess is larger than now because Hispanic people (again, with apologies) were voting very similarly, like Black people still do today, as a group.
In 2024 "Hispanic" looks much sillier because the range of people the label covers is more obviously super-diverse, covering so many different national origins, political views, skin colors, language skills, immigrant backgrounds, etc... Some diversity was there 40 years ago but on average the range was lower.
No need to apologize. Just wanted to point out that there's disagreement over it within the Hispanic/Latin community, and some of us do think it was imposed on us, even if ultimately we end up using it for the same expediency reasons you list. Also agreed it made more sense 40 years ago than now.
Sure. I mean, I think the US has far too few racial/ethnic census categories and should have vastly more. At the very least, the 574 tribes should each have one and there should be at least one for every other country in the world (so at least 200 of those, but most countries have internal divisions so likely more like 500+), plus a wide variety of “mixed” groups. Plus some left-over categories, like ADOS and “lots of different European immigrant origins but so mixed I can’t really tell / don’t really care”, etc.
I think that imposing a standard grouping on those (ie defining which are “white” and which “Black” and which “Asian”) is a mistake - if you just have people say “Syrian Arab” or “Druze”, or “Lebanese Maronite” and then don’t have an official decision of whether that’s “white” or “Asian” or something else (“Arab”?) and then let all the organisations decide which groups they want to organise around.
If you want to be a Hispanic political organisation, then you write a list of which categories you want to count as Hispanic and different organisations don’t have to agree with each other.
It annoys me that you have giant census-created categories - and so do we! This isn’t a US-specific complaint. Why the hell isn’t there a “White (American”) on the UK census and a separate “White (Canadian)”? But I think it’s important to remember that they are giant categories created by the census and that the map is not the territory.
It would be easy enough with technology to just let people on the Census list what race(s) and ethnicit(y/ies) they are, and then people can merge them into broader categories if they wish after the fact. I also strongly agree there should be an ADOS category.
This is the sort of thing that could be done in the 2030 census if there was a smart way to have large language models parse free form data into whatever categories a particular researcher wants to work with (with some appropriate privacy safeguards). I would not be surprised if the 2040 census does something like this.
This would work for some academic purpose, but the general population is not going to be able to remember hundreds of categories for people. They will naturally consolidate into 3-10 groups at most.
You only have to remember the ones you belong to, so I don't think it's that hard.
We have too many and should have none, a la France.
Any time you put people into groups larger than one person you will get blurring of the differences. Some may object to "Hispanics" as a category but how often do we see "Caucasian" as a category as well?
I guess everyone could be their own group but then we get into the Walt Whitman problem and every single individual containing multitudes. Ultimately we're led to quantum theory and madness.
For the record, on the British census, there is White (British), White (Irish), White (Traveller), and White (Other), at least.
Why don’t they just say British, Traveller, Irish, Other Primarily European?
The US census codes Hispanic separately from race for the exact reason you describe. It's all the usual races (white, black, Pacific islander, etc), and then a separate question if you are "Hispanic of any race".
But fwiw, it's more common to take that census data and encode Hispanic as an exclusive racial category when performing or presenting analysis. The poll results in Matt's post today seem to do that.
This made me feel very white.
I read this in Cartman’s voice
There's been a lot of efforts by these people to make People Of Color a singular political omnibloc, despite ironically ignoring the vast diversity among these people, as you observe.
A still find the efforts of these people to exclude Asians from their categories of preferred people both comical and abhorrent.
What's even worse is that they want to sometimes exclude them and sometimes include them, but only on their terms.
Honestly, it's hilarious. My hispanic in-laws are the most conservative people I know and I live in South Florida.
How many articles do we have to read about how Latin Americans do not like being called "latinx" before white people stop insisting that this is appropriate language?
The thing about terms like "latinx" is that it wasn't white people pushing it, it was highly-educated non-white people often in academic circles doing that and it gained credibility among white liberals for that reason.
And that's part of the problem: you often have these highly educated non-white academics and activists who claim to represent the best interests even though they are often as wildly out of touch with the people they claim to represent as us white liberals.
That's my take on it as well. White progressives are often taking their racial cues, including language, from their non-white peers in their social and academic circles - who are also uber-progressive on these matters. In progressive circles, BIPOC progressives typically hold the most status, power and influence and it is more or less ordained so by the progressive "hierarchies" of whose voices are "centered" and such - but it is white progressives that are higher in number and more visible as a result, so there is this sort of belief that progressivism itself is an ideology solely of the highly educated/academic/professional urban whites and being imposed on otherwise non-racially interested "working class" non-whites.
The reality is a bit more complicated, progressivism is an ideology of academia for sure, but "BIPOC", particularly in the sectors of academia most steeped with "DEI" philosophy and activism, are heavily present in how the ideology and language and activism is shaped and shipped downhill, and it is the white progressives that are often taking their cues from these non-white centers of the movement, and there are varying degrees of how much these "BIPOC" representatives in academic and elite circles a) come from the same backgrounds of the communities they claim to represent class-wise, culturally and sometimes ethnically (there is a high proportion of Black students at elite universities that are the children of wealthy Nigerian and/or Haitian immigrants/nationals and not necessarily of middle/working class African-American backgrounds), and b) even if so, when they get to university how much/how little their perspectives are with their home communities. It's not just white kids from the small town that go to university and come back steeped in new (and sometimes radical) ideas and cultures, but their minority peers that make it into these circles may also do the completely normal college kid thing of adapting "radical chic" when away and differentiating quite a bit from their hometown peers and family, and when this is of course highly encouraged by the university itself to become much more "radical" and "conscious" ahem "woke" in ones approach to race and identity, specifically for "BIPOC" students, it's not difficult to see how this divide begins to happen.
It's become a meme of convenience particularly for conservatives/DEI opponents to portray progressivism/DEI and politically unpopular "language" devices like "Latinx" as stemming from their most powerful (and despised) political opponents (urban white liberal Democrats) and being imposed on unwilling communities of non-whites because it allows conservatives to attack these ideas and movements without having to necessarily attack non-whites (an always dicey proposition for conservatives given the association of conservatism with racism as an attack target for its own opponents, let alone the propensity of a lot of right wing critique on minority activism and issues to end up in racist tropes), in fact, in their telling of it, they are the true "allies" versus the fake and disconnected white liberals. Conservatives are obviously a lot more comfortable attacking Robin D'Angelo as the avatar of DEI excess, but D'Angelo is really just parroting the ideas and scholarship of a lot of Black "race theory" scholars and activists, pathologizing "whiteness" for example was definitely not invented by D'Angelo - in fact that was some of the basis of the accusations of plagiarism in D'Angelo's work ;p
In reality though it is really an educational/class/social/political divide over a racial divide. Highly educated particularly academic/institutional types are very progressive across all racial categories, and working class/middle class types are less so, across all racial categories - but numerically speaking, there are just more progressive whites than non-whites in most contexts so it can seem at the surface to be a top-down "white" ideology, but that really misunderstands the in-dynamics of progressive and activist groups and institutions along the "progressive intersectional hierarchy".
"Latinx" as I understand it did come from the "intersectional" alliances of campus and activist "La Raza" and other progressive Hispanic advocacy type groups from their LGBTQ members. It picked up traction across other academic and activist groups for the same reasons of "intersectionality" and their own in-group dynamics of racial/ethnic/issue progressive advocates that happen to also have a much higher proportion of LGBTQ representatives in those groups than in their broader communities because of the "intersectionality" of progressive racial and LGBTQ advocacy, and the somewhat obvious factor that of course LGBTQ members of these communities are going to find more comfort and acceptance with their more progressive and educated peers to engage with the activism and representation of their community they want to have, without perhaps some of the less accepting environments of their communities outside of academia etc. And of course since the types of minorities that the majority of academic/highly educated/institutional white progressives will have contact with are minorities of the same milieu, and those minorities are also highly progressive and traffic in the same terms (and police those terms often aggressively), stuff like "Latinx" becomes coin of the realm - acceptable and encouraged for (and maybe even punished for not) using the term in those groups and all their output, but unpopular with minorities outside of it, and in terms of which social pressure has more influence, if you're a white progressive employed at a university or progressive media outlet, you're a lot more susceptible to the demands and preferences of your minority colleagues than those of the small business owners and manual laborers you rarely come into contact with on a personal basis, and for whom "Latinx" is a silly affect that they might have heard some of their kids and grandkids that went to University occasionally use when they come home on breaks (and maybe roll their eyes at) but not part of their normal discourse.
Basically - it's the academia minority progressives that are often out of touch with their own communities on the language and priorities of their activism, and white progressives often don't have the personal experience to differentiate that the members of the Black Student Alliance at Columbia may have much different social-cultural-politics and backgrounds than that of the nearby Black working class - often living in just a few square miles of these locations but might as well be in a different time zone sometimes, culturally and politically speaking.
All to say - the progressive movement would be doing itself a lot of favors to break out of its institutional and social bubbles if it wants to have real odds at being an effective political movement, and lose a lot of the self defeating stuff that makes it toxic or just plain silly. The referenced NY Times piece quoted an absurd anecdote of a university department concerned that its gardens and arboretum weren't attracting more non-white students and public because of the "Latin" genus-species naming of the plants (and then seeking to "correct" that by introducing a set or ridiculous alternatives that would be even more esoteric for the average American than the Latin plant name, like what the heck is "Two Eyed Seeing" as a means to identify plants lol who "identifies" with that "way of seeing nature" in the Michigan U region, let alone even heard of this term?), when in reality, it's because it's location is not very accessible without a car from the university proper. It's the same stupidity tying up societies like the Audobon society (also subject to renaming lol) - the small number of non-white bird enthusiast members is because many bird species are named after "white colonizers" and maybe *gasp* some slave owners from 200 years ago, and not the also similar problems of access and a much harder to quantify "free time" to spend bird watching that people who are predominantly working class (which is a lot of of minorities) have a lot less of. But rather than put their resources into trying to address those much more tactical problems (maybe do some birding outreach in schools, provide busses or walking tours for "urban birding" etc), they're renaming birds while being absurdly strident about the "white supremacy" nature of birding itself and creating a lot of divisiveness within this relatively already tiny society, and I guarantee you that not one single working class Black person who has any inkling of interest in birds is even paying attention to, let alone would even associate the names of a bird like "cardinal" to some racist origin as a reason to not get into birding, and is certainly not being provided with any tangible means to explore the hobby in the meantime ;p. But that is the "progressivism" that happens when it becomes an insular class/social thing, and when that class/social caste becomes driven by "woke" without any effective external controls, renaming the "Audobon Society" away from its "colonialist white supremacist" origins takes on life and importance, and yes there are (the few) "Black birders" in the society that are pushing this with their white "allies", like trying to force down "Latinx" (and the gendered Spanish language as a whole) some "intersectional" stake in the ground, pushed by a demographically outsized dominated LGBTQ Hispanic activism/campus set and their allies.
I don't think this is really a thing with "white people" anymore if it ever was. The proponents are fighting a desperate rearguard action these days.
Yeah I think anyone who is confronted with the problem of making the term Latino/a more inclusive just results in switching to “Hispanic”
I’ve nearly always heard usage of this terminology being driven by people who speak Spanish natively, but who have (or are in the process of earning) phds.
In Portuguese, you would sometimes need an x with a tilde over it, which is obviously just momentum. May as well write \int x e^{ipx}.
"it reflects the fact that younger people are growing up in a less racist, more integrated society [...] as a broad social trend, it’s change for the better."
I just really want to highlight how much I agree with this, and how it should be seen as such an obviously good thing no matter what. I'm very happy Matt made this point explicit.
Racial polarization might well be the worst form of polarization because it's so unchangeable.
Serious conflicts are most likely to arise from classes that are unchangeable, like religion in the middle east or France in the 18th century.
Religious conflict is often codified as racial conflict, however. There's plenty of anti-islamic sentiment based in legitimate dislike of some of Islam's tenets, but there's also a lot of people who don't actually know much about Islam, but dislike brown people.
I’m sure it’s a much smaller effect than abortion, but one thought I had during the 2020-21 progressive abolish ICE/ border guards are evil heyday was: “uh- have you seen who actually staffs ICE in places like Texas and Arizona? Pretty heavily Hispanic. Do you think that this rhetoric might be a little alienating to them?”
A lot of Black and Hispanic cops and security guards out there too.
>Similarly, the best way to do better with blue-collar union members probably isn’t to triple-down on pro-union stuff <
Yes. Clearly giving tens of billions in bailouts to the Teamsters wasn't money well spent in Machiavellian political terms.
Ninety percent of workers don’t belong to unions. Handing out goodies to 10% of workers has massive potential for making the other 90% jealous.
I think the point Charles is making is that it's not all that clear that handing out goodies to the 10% is actually helping get votes with the 10%.
I have no doubt there are a number of Teamsters members who are unhappy that Sean O'Brien came out loud and proud for Trump. But there is no way O'Brien is giving this very public support to Trump if he thought this would create a huge backlash among his members. The fact he felt comfortable doing this is a pretty good piece of evidence that he thinks majority of his union are voting for Trump.
worse than that - most union workers aren't getting handouts either
Perhaps, it's time to completely dump unions, who embody rent seeking, and double down on expanding and improving EITC and OSHA. Worker safety and financial security are fine goals and need not be restricted to specific rent seeking arrangements.
I think that's going way too far and even just in political terms unions still provide Dems needed electoral and organizing muscle. However, the smaller the percentage of people in unions gets and the less those in unions stay aligned with Dem politics and priorities, the less incentive there is for Dems to cater to unions.
Neither of those agency/programs will help a worker who wants to compare salaries with a co-worker, against written company policy, and gets punished for it.
Unions and labor law have their place.
The problem usually isn't the unions pushing for fair pay. The problem is all the union rules that interfere with work place efficiency. See for example, dock workers resistance to automation.
Or public unions resistance to basically all forms of accountability
That's well and good, but that's not OSHA.
I disagree. You can pass legislation to specifically require pay transparency. Auto workers knew there was a caste system. Older unioned worker made more than new ones. It was sanctified by the union.
Also, in almost any workplace, experienced workers make more money
We have legislation, it's the NLRA
Federal law prohibits an employer from disciplining or firing you for discussing your pay and benefits with your coworkers.
*still think unions have a place, just noting that its not unions that stop those discussions.
Yes, the NLRA does. OSHA does not.
Sure - but it is still a law prohibiting it, not union organizing.
So long as everyone gets a Cadillac pension from the government, I could get behind a radically expanded EITC (or just a generous UBI) and no unions, honestly, and I’m quite pro-labor in this world. I get why no one would make the trade off until the benefits are set in stone though
Neither was giving out 175 billion dollars in student loan forgiveness. The only silver lining that I can see from a potential Trump win is Democrats realizing how dumb this kind of old school politics is.
Thanks for mentioning the poll boss! I’m going to add a question on sports teams and medical transition for minors in the spring survey.
Oh gosh, I am not yet awake. I read your comment about sports teams and thought - huh, that would be interesting to see how fans of different teams align politically. Perhaps it is because I read an article today about people who attempt to complete a Red Line double-header (seeing both a Cubs and a White Sox game on the same day, taking CTA between them). But now that I realize that that is not what you mean, I still think it would be interesting.
What is the age range for your survey? Is it just college graduates? Or how are you getting non-college graduates?
1. N=5,500 sample of registered voters nationally with an N=2,750 oversample of 18-29s.
2. No, not just college graduates. Our raw sample did have a lot of college graduates but that’s why we weight things.
3. We used a vendor called Prolific to field the survey then weighted things to ensure a representative sample. Full methodology at bottom of results on youthpoll.yale.edu
Milan, could you say more about the methodology? What does an N=2750 oversample mean? If Prolific sampled 5500 registered voters how was that group comprised of half in the target age range when in the entire population of18-29 year olds comprise around 20%? Did they sample a lot more than 5500 (like around 15,000) to get the 2750 in the 18-29 age range, keep 2750 of those older than 29 and throw out the rest?
Also, as a favor to all the pedants like me out there, it would be great if you didn't show results to three significant figures given the natural uncertainty in poll results.
No we sampled exactly 5,500 RVs. Oversample just means we got extra young people, so we can split them off and get data on what young voters think. For the full electorate sample we use the full N=5,500 and just downweight all the 18-29s so they match their share of the population.
Let me get a little into the weeds to explain. Prolific was our vendor, meaning we used their service to distribute the survey. The survey itself was made using Qualtrics. Way it works is that Prolific sends people from their panel to the Qualtrics survey.
What we did is create one survey form (because we asked everyone the same questions) in Qualtrics. Then Professor Kalla made two different surveys in Prolific — one for Americans of any age range, and another restricted to Americans 18-29. Each of those two was in the field until we got back 2,750 responses a piece.
Thanks!
So if I had to guess, I'd guess that they would first ask the person how old they were, and if older than 29 ask them the rest of the questions until they got 2750 usable respondents but otherwise stop the interview once they had hit the 2750. If the respondent was under 30 they would keep interviewing until they got *that* 2750 sample.
There was a post on Slow Boring a while ago that referenced a political poll that I keep thinking about (but can't relocate, unfortunately) that had like eight political opinions all of which got around 2/3 of Democrats approval. But only 16% or so approved of all of them.
Coalition politics is hard, but you have to be chill on at least some points. The academics and activists, who represent a small section of the Democratic coalition drive too much of the discourse and are very invested in not being chill.
If the polls on non-white voters materialize at the voting booth, there has to be some sort of pre-registration not listen to the Groups or any non-empirical academic pontificators on why and what the response should be.
I'd say the good news is that Kamala Harris is running a very chill campaign.
The question is how she will govern though.
Biden also ran a campaign talking about bringing people together. But certainly didn't govern that way
Considering she's likely to have a Republican Senate, she will probably have no choice but to govern that way.
That would be awesome. I've long thought that was Biden's biggest problem was winning the senate. All of a sudden he thought he was the second coming of FDR and lost his head.
One way of putting this is extremists love polarization. The same reason Hamas and Netanyahu had a twisted, symbiotic relationship up until 10/7. Folks who don't want policy to end up in the middle with compromise try and shrink the middle.
The folks in academia and activism are extremists on racial issues. The last thing they want is for the racial temperature to be turned down. And they are in many ways allies of the Stephen Miller wing of the GOP which also doesn't want the racial temperature turned down.
But turning the temperature down is good for mainstream liberals and good for America.
Hi. I'm in academia. I don't consider myself any kind of extremist on racial issues. I recognize that racism is real and I want everyone to be treated with dignity and respect; I also want the far-left DEI nonsense to go away and stay away.
I’m also in academia and I don’t feel Dilan’s statement included you and me. I definitely think it’s a true statement about many of the institutions I’ve worked for.
If he has just said “folx in academia”, the distinction would’ve been so clear.
Keep this account around for a couple decades at least, a record of statements like this will be quite exculpatory when the purge begins. I would like to see a large quantity of academics shuffling off to the jobs agency.
It's very clear that the best thing for The Groups would be a Trump win next month.
> The same reason Hamas and Netanyahu had a twisted, symbiotic relationship up until 10/7.
And which finally did in Yehyeh Sinwar today.
You've been adjacent to this thesis in other columns, and I couldn't agree more that racial depolarization is a very good thing for America. One of the biggest internal existential threats to the American project could be hard racial polarization, and I think the 2012 - 2016 period was trending in a pretty scary way on that front.
In some ways Biden's win in 2020, while a bit disappointing in terms of how much narrower it was vs what was polled, was hopeful in the way you outline here. He won because he traded some Black/Hispanic vote for white vote and it paid off.
The current driver of polarization today seems to be education, although I've heard (maybe on NYT's Matter of Opinion??) that it's high vs low social trust voters. Compared to hard racial polarization, this feels like something that is more flexible in terms of election to election outcome. If hard racial polarization really set in, well, you can't change your skin color. But I can see how situations can change how high/low education/trust voters polarize between the parties election to election. I think this electoral plasticity will encourage the parties to actually engage with outreach because voters feel gettable again, and might finally kill the nihilistic "lol nothing matters" political attitude that's been hanging around since 2016.
On the other hand, I think the state of the current Republican Party shows some of the serious problems with polarization around social trust. Matt has written about both the crank realignment and the difficulty of getting competent people in Republican governance and both of those seem like serious issues for a country that's divided this way.
I don't think any mode of polarization is without downside! Honestly any mode of polarization, if it becomes super locked in, can lead to political problems. I suppose if I had to choose I'd rather have social trust polarization rather than racial polarization because social trust can change within a person over time while race...not so much.
But agree that it's easy to imagine hard social trust polarization leading to its own bad stuff.
I wonder if a polarization like “service economy” vs “manufacturing and resource economy” might be the least problematic.
Obviously I want there to be fewer racists, but I also want to move to a world where racists are 50/50 split across both parties (i.e. one party did not make a deliberate strategic decision to court them), just like all the other nutjobs and wierdos, so the non-racists aren't stuck being single-issue voters who only have one party to choose from.
Unfortunately, you're getting the opposite where all the other nutjobs and weirdos also move to the same party as the racists.
don't worry there are plenty of nutjobs and racists on the left. They just celebrate Hamas and hate the Jews and White people instead
Do you prefer your Hamas regular, with roasted red peppers, or with garlic and dill? I usually have it with some toasted pita and olive tapenade on the side.
And lo and behold, they're explicitly voting for Jill Stein on the basis that she can act as a spoiler for Kamala Harris.
Those people may be on the left, but they're not Democrats. Most of them say "both sides are the same" and refuse to vote at all.
You don't think all those protestors at Columbia and Harvard aren't democrats???
The ones in the encampment? Very likely not many democratic votes among them. Maybe in the encampment on the Duke or UNC or Penn campuses, where they understand that they live in a swing state.
Which to be clear is important because if parties feel they have a shot every election you get less zero sum political thinking and hopefully more functional political institutions.
Unfortunately, when both parties feel they have a shot every election you get more not less zero sum thinking.
If you believe you can win next time, the party out of power is incentivized to just block any positive governance that makes the in party look good. Cf McConnell vis a vis Obama, or the Republican House today undrr Biden.
If you think you’re not just a point away from winning next time, you’re incentivized to compromise because you might get a part loaf now, and you know you aren’t just one cycle away from the full loaf.
Q: what do you do when you have no hope of an electoral avenue to get your preferred policies enacted?
A: 9/11
there have been near countless instances where lack of democracy produced no hope of an electoral avenue, not every instance resulted in terrorism as a response.
That statement also implies “groups of truly fringe people are in general those who resort to terror,” so you’re not disagreeing.
I think you get political zero sum thinking when you don't believe you have a chance at winning the next election or that your chronic inability to win majorities forces you to built anti-majoritarian guardrails.
I do worry that along with racial depolarization we’re getting another pernicious type of identity-based polarization: men v women. I thought Richard Reeves’ Politico piece today was a good articulation of how Kamala could be speaking more to men, without alienating women.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/10/17/harris-campaign-strategy-men-00184062
Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if gender polarization is the big story of mid-November
60-40 is a far cry from 93-7
2014*-2021 had me seriously considering how to emigrate to avoid being made to participate in a race war.
Politics is polarizing around gender.
The scary thing about Black voters shifting right, from the perspective of the Dem party, is that there could easily be a tipping point dynamic. As Matt pointed out, a lot of Black loyalty for Dems is socially "enforced". Meaning things like, maybe having a Trump yard alienates you from your neighbors in many Black communities and it might suggest bad things about you beyond your politics...you're not really "one of us". (same could be said for a Trump sign on my street, btw, but more for class reasons).
But if it hits a level where, say 30% of young Black voters are with the GOP, that takes away a lot of stigma and opens floodgates. Probably a lot of people who wouldn't have considered even thinking about it begin to, well, think about it.
And then I don't know what Democrats do. Talk about a realignment. My guess is this actually happens in a cycle or two, as in Black voters hit 20%+ for GOP followed by something like a 35% level 4 years later.
I thinking the tipping point is far more likely to be a Trump loss.
Putting a McCain sign, or a Romney sign, was not a point of shame. Lots of people in blue areas did this. Sure, your neighbors might disagree with politics, but no one defaulted to thinking that you were a moron, or a racist.
Trump signs, OTOH, oh boy. I'm not an idiot, I know 45% of people are voting Trump. But I am also pretty damn sure that about half of those 45% are acutely aware that Trump is a moron, a grifter, and a racist. They either do not care, or they think voting Republican is worth holding their nose about it. This is different from legitimately believing that Trump is a capable, (i.e. competent) leader, which will definitely get you shamed in lots of areas.
If Trump loses, and some normie Rpeublicans get nominated, you are going to see a lot more yard signs in 2028, and it won't really be because the politics have radically shifted.
*rightfully* shamed
I think it's also scary for Republicans. Right now it doesn't seem that they have to adjust any of their, well, let's call it "white supremacy adjacent" rhetoric (or policies) to carve out parts of the Black electorate. At some point to attract more or retain that growing part of their electorate they may be forced to moderate a lot of their views. That's a very tricky thing! I mean, if you're trying to retain a third of the Black vote, talking about Haitians eating cats may not be the best approach.
"I mean, if you're trying to retain a third of the Black vote, talking about Haitians eating cats may not be the best approach."
Maybe? I strongly suspect that a major "race story" of the next few decades will be about hostility between "ADOS" and black immigrant populations as well potentially hostility between different nationalities of black immigrant populations.
My (Black) girlfriend said “oh no” when she found out Kamala’s dad was Jamaican.
Already plenty of negative views both ways within these communities
I agree that there are already negative views between ADOS and immigrant black populations -- that was actually the subject of a "Homicide: Life on the Streets" episode back in the 1990s, IIRC -- but it also traditionally involved such microscopic populations (and especially, shares of the electorate) that it was more of a novelty than anything. I'm meaning it will play more of a role in election campaigning, etc.
Yeah, the Confederates were always good at the divide and conquer strategy
Two more quick things: Trump said (some) Mexicans were racists and picked up and help a significant amount of Hispanics, including even Mexicans. He barely adjusted his messaging in 2020 or now on these topics.
2nd - just being forced to not talk about eating cats seems much less scary than losing a third of a voting block because of inevitable societal forces. There's lots of ways to adjust for the former, much harder to prevent the latter.
Well, we'll see how he actually does with Hispanics come Nov. 5. Maybe great, I dunno.
Well, I'm just a country doctor but I'd say that denigrating large blocs of your voters may not be the smartest strategy.
We agree on that, think the question is do Black Americans generally consider Haitian immigrants as part of their block or not? And I feel like the fraction that do may be falling, in the same way that less Hispanics see themselves as "the recent immigrant block"
I'm kind of with srnerson on this. Dissing Haitians probably seems the most racist to older Black Americans. Younger Blacks may be more likely to see it as anti-immigrant. But if they themselves are ant-immigrant maybe it doesn't matter. At least some of the prominent voices of locals complaining in Ohio are local Black people who already lived there.
Yeah, my immediate thought is that Haitians are fairly distinct as being a heavily immigrant group and speaking another language.
The good news for Democrats is that JD Vance will likely be the Republican nominee in 2028, whom I highly doubt has any greater pull with the black community than a generic Republican.
For me, personally that assumption is getting to far ahead of ourselves. But I agree that if Trump is the reason black votes are peeling off, then things *could* mean revert.
But a lot of this voting behavior change just seems to be generational. 4 years from now 20% of current senior citizen Black voters, who still vote D at the highest numbers, will have passed and been replaced by younger Black voters who are far more socially assimilated and drawn from much more diverse ethnic and geographic backgrounds. There's really no single "black community" anymore.
I just think people don’t put yard signs out for the socially enforced out party but vote for them anyway if so inclined. I’ve seen a couple of Reichert signs in the neighborhood (the Republican gubernatorial candidate, who is moderate-ish but not by enough), but never a Trump sign. Whereas my mom has been nervous about putting her Harris Walz sign up in Mississippi. No one wants to have their neighbors upset with them or have their house vandalized.
I understand, but the yard signs also enforce the community polarization. According to what I've read here, they actually do have an impact in turnout and persuasion.
So my thesis about Black voter tipping point generalizes to any sort of community. Like I mentioned, so far there's one Trump sign on my street, but as you mentioned, I bet there are more Trump voters. But if every Trump voter on my street put up a sign, more people in my community might not just vote for Trump, but feel OK about organizing, persuading, etc... It's a self-reinforcing cycle.
True
If real, perhaps the realignment would be good for city government in that blue cities could do with more skepticism about government unions, progressive make-work projects along with a more business-friendly attitude towards zoning and permitting.
People tend to overestimate the size of minority groups.Interestingly they don't seem to underestimate the size of the White population by too much.
They also seem to think the Black population is larger than the Hispanic population.
https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/41556-americans-misestimate-small-subgroups-population
Given how poorly these estimates fit together it seems clear people are just bad at estimates.
It would be interesting to know what the mechanism for Democrats doing better with White voters is. Is just a consequence of the parties shifts on social issues?
Are there any instances that people know of where Democrats are making appeals specifically to White voters that might be fueling this shift?
"They also seem to think the Black population is larger than the Hispanic population."
This is due to a combination of (1) Hispanic underrepresentation in popular media (this has been noted for years) and (2) a fairly large percentage of people who identify as "Hispanics" for historical cultural reasons being completely visually indistinguishable from people who identify as "white." (See, e.g., well-known person of color Anya Taylor-Joy.)
I don't know if Martin Sheen checks "Hispanic" in the census questionnaire, but he is another great example.
First Hispanic president, no less!
What about Dubya?
Martin Sheen took office on September 22, 1999, more than a year before George W. Bush.
Did Dubya claim that?
It’s possible someone claimed it on his behalf, the way Maya Angelou called Bill Clinton the first black president.
Additionally it actually was true not that long ago (year 2000 looks to have been when it swapped), and some of us oldsters may not have updated. When I was born the hispanic population in the US was 1/3 of the black population.
I'm blown away that poll responders could think 29% of the public is Asian when it's 6%, and only a little less surprised that Black was thought of as 41% when reality is 12%.
They didn't ask about multi-racial Americans, but I'd guess that one is underestimated.
On White voters, specifically, it probably is just education, as older, less educated voters pass away and are replaced with a much more educated younger cohort.
I genuinely think this is because of TV casting. When you have four main characters on a show and one of them is inevitably black, it skews people’s perceptions on proportions.
I like this theory but the counter I'd give are Hispanics, since we're also overestimated in surveys but I don't think we are particularly overrepresented on TV.
We've got like, one tough Latina detective on each cop show and Sofia Vergara and that's it.
This is George Lopez erasure.
The most underrepresented group of Americans in movies and TV, bar none, are mestizos. Hollywood would fill all its slots for the Hispanic census category with Pizarro and Cortez themselves if they could.
Made me LOL, but it's dark humor. That is screwed up, and true.
For Black I was thinking sports, also, and maybe to some degree music. In terms of TV casting, I guess most shows are set in cities, where it would make sense to have more Asian and Black characters?
I find the distortion to be much greater in British TV shows. Britain, except for London, is much whiter than the US
I've always wondered about this when watching The Great British Bake-Off. In recent seasons about half of the contestants are either non-white or immigrants from other UK countries. Native-born white British people are 76.8% of the UK population (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Kingdom#Ethnicity), but at least in the current season only half the contestants fall in that category. (2023's cohort was more representative.)
That casting in British television (especially BBC productions) at this stage is basically straight-up free recruitment advertising for "Great Replacement Theory" white supremacists has been observed in certain quarters.
Black people have also "punched above their weight" in culture beyond casting, which I think is a good thing. Racial issues also dominate political debates either explicitly or implicitly which has generally been a bad thing. So when you combine the political and cultural aspects, it makes sense why people may overestimate how many black people there are in the US. But it probably mostly comes down to people being hilariously bad at estimates for anything you could ask.
That doesn't get you to 41% though!
This is mostly based on the way people do estimates like this.
https://www.noahsnewsletter.com/p/why-do-people-overestimate-the-size
"The answer can be found in a paper<LINK PROVIDED IN ABOVE LINK> by David Landy and colleagues. Based on prior research, these authors hypothesised that we rely on Bayesian reasoning (consciously or otherwise) when we’re asked to estimate a percentage. We begin with a value from our own experience, and then adjust it upwards or downwards toward 50% (the prior probability). If we’re asked about something that seems “common”, we begin above 50% and then adjust downwards. If we’re asked about something that seems “rare”, we begin below 50% and then adjust upwards. For something we have absolutely no clue about, we just stick with 50%. Landy and colleagues refer to the process of adjustment as “uncertainty-based rescaling”. Here’s how they describe it:"
Rule 1: People are innumerate.
Rule 2: People are innumerate.
Rule 3: People are innumerate.
Being from Memphis, it was very easy for me to just assume that the country is half black, though life in Seattle has corrected that assumption…
https://youtube.com/watch?v=cpzmsHB0INE
Now *that* brings back high school nostalgia
Those estimates make no sense when you start adding them up:
Native Americans 27%; Asian Americans 29%; Black Americans 41%
so... White Americans are 100 - 27 - 29 - 41 = 3%? And then, by extension, Hispanic Americans are overwhelmingly Black?
People all over the world are notoriously hopeless at estimating numbers of anything. This is interesting in itself, but I don't think it tells you anything interesting about race particularly. If you asked people to estimate the proportions of people with varying levels of educational attainment you'd probably reach a similarly ridiculous number.
Oh, I know, it's just funny how when you put all the estimates together, it's like "wait..." It would be nice if YouGov, as part of the survey, showed respondents how the numbers they estimated all added up, and gave them a chance to revise, though I suspect they likely didn't.
Thanks for my daily reminder that the average person is in very few meaningful ways smarter than a domestic cat.
You need a lot of capacities that a cat doesn’t have in order to use numbers to guess these things.
If you asked people these questions in the same way that you could ask a cat (eg, training them that the snack is inside the cup labeled with the ethnicity of a randomly chosen person and then giving them new cups and seeing how often they choose each) the humans would actually probably be about as good as the cat - maybe better.
Stimulus-response, stimulus-response.
Just assume the average poll respondent is terrible at math.
To be fair, people tend to overestimate pretty much _any_ small percentage. For a surprising number of people the lowest number they will give an a "what percentage" question is 10%. Root cause a lot of this is just simple innumeracy.
Innumeracy isn't a great word for this. It is a very powerful subconscious bias that you are not immune to even if you are aware of it, and good with math.
White voters are (on average) more pro-abortion than either Black voters (marginally) or Latino voters (significantly). I figure that's a major factor.
The article literally has a poll that shows black and white voters support abortion at the same rate!
The important thing, as Matt points out, is that more white voters support abortion than support Dems as a baseline - so that issue helps increase Dems’ white voter share.
That doesn’t pass the smell test if we’re talking about abortion without restrictions, but I bet those numbers are fairly close for medication abortions.
I am inclined to believe those numbers. The difference between now and 3 years ago is we now have seen what happens when there are restrictions. People might, in the abstract, prefer abortion to be legal up to 18 weeks (arbitrary number), with exceptions for life of the mother and dead fetus. But then they see people dying because doctors refused to treat them, even when there is a life of the mother exception in place. People see women having to carry dead fetuses. And they see 12 year olds having to carry fetuses that were the product of rape. And that changes their opinions really quickly.
Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!
Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!
A classic: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
Nope.
https://youtu.be/0IYYsIhOIXc?si=Z05JsWALEeUtWwkC
What genre would you call this?
Stoner metal. I'm a big fan of Clutch. They evolve from DC Hardcore to storytelling stoner metal to a bluesy, Americana-steeped hard rock and back and forth. I recommend the self titled album and Robot Hive/Exodus to start with.
I think it's further improvement with college educated white voters and white women voters.
How did that infamous Schumer gaffe go..."for every rural working class voter we lose, we'll gain two suburban professional voters" or something. Now these polls are tilting at, like..."for every voter of colour we lose, we'll gain two white voters". Which, uh, hmm. Perhaps that's simply better pragmatic politics, but it leaves me a little uncomfortable as a non-white. Not like there's no recent history of Asian interests being thrown under the bus for white benefit. Even if it's still the better deal vs. GOP rule, it's hard not to worry about that bargain getting less favourable over time. The whole your-vote-is-taken-for-granite thing...it'd go down easier with some of that less-is-more approach, but I am still waiting for that shoe to drop on the issues I care about, yknow?
Nate Silver lining: if it becomes more widely acknowledged that nonwhites trending rightwards is just How Things Are Now, that lifts some of the chilling effect around being honest with one's sociopolitical views in left company. Perhaps that'll have a bankshot effect of further deflating the Progressive Mobilization Myth and other obscene forms of racial pandering that have been deeply tiring to slog through for the last dozen years. Or even help deflate actual racism, which is so often exacerbated by misunderestimating the differences between groups. Life in retail certainly got easier for me when I stopped being so progressively precious about pious purities...I'd like to think the customers appreciate it on net too. Harder to serve The People if one can't model and fit in with them.
Your silver lining seems more correct. I see what you mean with the first part, but I don’t think it’s a zero-sum game here, and what that would really look like is “for every working-class nonwhite social conservative we lose, we flip two probably-white middle-class suburbanites fed up with the Trump circus.”
The racial zero-sum thinking seems to be applied at a level very separate from electorate analysis and campaign planning. If the Dems were seriously letting the proverbial 21 year old Daily Kos interns to do their actual demographic research and message planning we would be talking about New York flipping red.
I think Kos is *really* focused on winning elections. We're not talking Jacobin here.
Sure.
Sigh.
I just can't share Matt Y's happy, optimistic "racial depolarization is good, yay!" outlook. Yes, other things being equal, I would certainly take less racial polarization rather than more. But other things aren't equal, and "less racial polarization" is a nice way of saying "a hell of a lot more educational polarization," which Matt barely acknowledges in this piece.
I want Democrats to win, both because I mostly agree with them on issues and because they are led by mostly sane and rational people, not a deranged would-be autocrat and his merry gang of sycophants who would continue to support him wholeheartedly even if he did shoot someone on Fifth Avenue. But unless we water down "college" to the point of meaninglessness, the share of the population that is college-educated will always top out at 30% or so. This is simply not a good way to win elections! What is to be done?
BTW, according to this poll, 8 out of 10 Black people believe that sex between two men is either always or almost always wrong. This is a) depressing as hell and b) further evidence that the progressive worldview of "evil oppressive cishet white people against everyone else, who is therefore united in solidarity" is wrong.
What if it's replaced by economic polarization instead of educational polarization instead? That was the normal politics of 1900 to 1980 or so. I'm not sure it was any better, though.
Yeah a big problem with the progressive worldview is that while it is true that just looking at the racial demographic breakdown by partisan voting pattern the largest group of reactionary conservative voters are white people, the worldview completely collapses in the face of the reality that the largest slice of votes on the left is also white people.
"further evidence that the progressive worldview of 'evil oppressive cishet white people against everyone else, who is therefore united in solidarity" is wrong.'"
No, it just goes to show how deeply Black Americans suffer from internalized racism! [/median progressive]
It was 2/10 not 8/10
I made a mistake- it’s 46% of Black people, I.e. almost half, who say gay sex is always or almost always wrong. That’s still depressing! It’s 2024, I thought there was more acceptance of gay sex/ relationships.
I've seen some research that it has actually slid a bit in the last couple of years. Almost certainly because of the overreach and craziness of the trans gender movement.
Not to mention the lack of tolerance for anybody that wasn't 100% on board with their agenda
I mean that stat makes sense coming from the Bible Belt, though there’s of course plenty of gay sex happening on the DL from members of these homophobic churches!
Especially the organist…
Pianists are often popular. They're very good with their hands.
Wait until the immigration from Africa sends those numbers tumbling down again.
Is there increased immigration from Africa going on?
I suspect that there may be less of a moral rationale at work here than meets the eye. There's no shortage of Black Americans, men especially, who believe that the LGBTQIA+ community has benefited more from civil rights measures than we have which is perceived as especially unfair for obvious reasons. I think resentment, in part, may be driving some of those opinions.
And a college education does not ipso facto translate into correct policy views.
"What is to be done?"
Persuade noncollege voters, across racial and gender lines, as the Democratic Party has been hiding from doing for decades.
OK, but persuade them how? Just trying to help the non-college-educated financially/materially (stronger social safety net, supporting unions) doesn't seem to do it. Kamala has pivoted *hard* to the center (talking about patriotism, an economy of opportunity rather than grievances and zero-sum struggle between the hegemonic whites and oppressed minority groups, tough on crime, talking up immigration reform) and it has done jack squat to shift low-educated voters' opinion of her. They think she's a phony, whereas Trump is a straight talker who "tells it like it is." /facepalm
I don't think it can be done within a single election cycle, let alone two and a half weeks. But it starts with setting the goal, continuing to publicize which aspects of substantively good policy are good for noncollege workers, and recruiting more noncollege workers to run for office within the Party.
🐟 dem don’t usually like to hang around the West Indian neighborhoods in NYC.
Oh, one obvious reason I forgot to mention that Hispanic voters in particular are moving right: they're less likely to have relatives who are here illegally. Democrats overestimated how much immigrants voters care about immigration, but it is true that many immigrants want their family to come here, and if they do have a family member here illegally, they don't want that family member deported. But as soon as everybody in your family is here legally, your views on immigration revert to the mean. The recent arrivals from Venezuela don't all have family here, so somebody who is Hispanic who is born here and both of their parents are legal immigrants isn't going to have views on immigration much different than the average White (or Black for that matter) American's views.
There's also some level of resentment from Mexican-American communities that have been here for generations toward the latest arrivals from other (Central and South American) countries, partially due to not wanting to be lumped in with them as a demographic group.